R for Data Science Cookbook

Generating random samples

In this section, we will introduce how to generate random samples from a given population with the sample and sample.int functions.

Getting ready

In this recipe, you need to prepare your environment with R installed.

How to do it…

Please perform the following steps to generate random samples.

1. First, generate random samples from 1 to 10:

   > sample(10)
   

2. If you would like to reproduce the same samples, you can set the random seed beforehand:

   > set.seed(123)
   > sample(10)
    [1]  3  8  4  7  6  1 10  9  2  5
   

3. You can then randomly choose two samples from 1 to 10:

   > sample(10,2)
   [1] 10  5
   

4. If the population and sample size are required arguments, you can also use the sample.int function:

   > sample.int(10,size=2)
   [1] 7 6
   

5. For example, one can simulate ...