PSA: R’s rnorm() and mvrnorm() use different spreads
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Quick public service announcement for my fellow R nerds:
R has two commonly-used random-Normal generators: rnorm and MASS::mvrnorm. I was foolish and assumed that their parameterizations were equivalent when you’re generating univariate data. But nope:
- Base R can generate univariate draws with
rnorm(n, mean, sd), which uses the standard deviation for the spread. - The MASS package has a multivariate equivalent,
mvrnorm(n, mu, Sigma), which uses the variance-covariance matrix for the spread. In the univariate case,Sigmais the variance.
I was using mvrnorm to generate a univariate random variable, but giving it the standard deviation instead of the variance. It took me two weeks of debugging to find this problem.
Dear reader, I hope this cautionary tale reminds you to check R function arguments carefully!
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