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GNU Octave Beginner's Guide

You're reading from   GNU Octave Beginner's Guide Become a proficient Octave user by learning this high-level scientific numerical tool from the ground up

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2011
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781849513326
Length 280 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Jesper Schmidt Hansen Jesper Schmidt Hansen
Author Profile Icon Jesper Schmidt Hansen
Jesper Schmidt Hansen
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Toc

Table of Contents (15) Chapters Close

GNU Octave
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
1. www.PacktPub.com
2. Preface
1. Introducing GNU Octave FREE CHAPTER 2. Interacting with Octave: Variables and Operators 3. Working with Octave: Functions and Plotting 4. Rationalizing: Octave Scripts 5. Extensions: Write Your Own Octave Functions 6. Making Your Own Package: A Poisson Equation Solver 7. More Examples: Data Analysis 8. Need for Speed: Optimization and Dynamically Linked Functions Pop quiz - Answers

Simple descriptive statistics


In Chapter 5, we implemented an Octave function mcintgr and its vectorized version mcintgrv. This function can evaluate the integral for a mathematical function f in some interval [a; b] where the function is positive. The Octave function is based on the Monte Carlo method and the return value, that is, the integral, is therefore a stochastic variable. When we calculate a given integral, we should as a minimum present the result as a mean or another appropriate measure of a central value together with an associated statistical uncertainty. This is true for any other stochastic variable, whether it is the height of the pupils in class, length of a plant's leaves, and so on.

In this section, we will use Octave for the most simple statistical description of stochastic variables.

Histogram and moments

Let us calculate the integral given in Equation (5.9) one thousand times using the vectorized version of the Monte Carlo integrator:

octave:4> for i=1:1000
&gt...
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