Generating random numbers with known mean but no information about underlying distribution
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I have some population-level gene expression data, and I'm trying to use it to simulate underlying single cell data. Is there a way in Matlab to create simulated data where I only know the mean and want to make no assumptions about the underlying distributions?
Thanks!
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James Tursa
on 4 Mar 2015
Edited: James Tursa
on 4 Mar 2015
Do you mean you want to create values from a distribution, and the only thing you know about this distribution is that you have a sample set of data from it? I think you are going to have to make at least some assumptions, like the samples will be uncorrelated. My guess is there may be something in the Statistics Toolbox that can do this for you (i.e., an RNG based on a distribution built from a sampled data set), but I do not know much about this toolbox myself.
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Star Strider
on 4 Mar 2015
Those were the only ones whose abstracts seemed relevant. I obviously did not look at all 15276 papers that search produced. It seems to be a problem that defies easy assumptions, but is an area of very active research.
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