Probability function

Would someone please help me with a function that would generate a random number based on probabilities?

Also, is there a function to randomly select a cell from one table, use the information in that cell (text, in my case) and place that information in a cell in another table?

Many thanks

Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Mar 11, 2010 8:01 PM

Reply
3 replies

Mar 12, 2010 7:15 PM in response to birnbaum

Unfortunately I do not know which statistical functions are available in Numbers '08 (I have '09) nor am I versed on statistics. However, a web search on excel random probabilities will give a bunch of hits.

Here is info from one site:

If we want to generate a random number having distribution Normal(μ,σ2) we can do it by the inverse transformation method. As we will see in class, if F(x) is the CDF of a random variable, F−1(y) is its inverse, and U is a uniform random number in [0, 1], then F−1(U) is a random observation from the distribution F . In Excel we can do this by typing NORMINV(RAND(), μ, σ) where μ is the mean and σ is the standard deviation.

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Probability function

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