Random {base} | R Documentation |
.Random.seed
is an integer vector, containing the random number
generator (RNG) state for random number generation in R. It
can be saved and restored, but should not be altered by the user.
RNGkind
is a more friendly interface to query or set the kind
of RNG in use.
RNGversion
can be used to set the random generators as they
were in an earlier R version (for reproducibility).
set.seed
is the recommended way to specify seeds.
.Random.seed <- c(rng.kind, n1, n2, ...) save.seed <- .Random.seed RNGkind(kind = NULL, normal.kind = NULL) RNGversion(vstr) set.seed(seed, kind = NULL)
kind |
character or NULL . If kind is a character
string, set R's RNG to the kind desired. If it is NULL ,
return the currently used RNG. Use "default" to return to the
R default. |
normal.kind |
character string or NULL . If it is a character
string, set the method of Normal generation. Use "default"
to return to the R default. |
seed |
a single value, interpreted as an integer. |
vstr |
a character string containing a version number,
e.g., "1.6.2" |
rng.kind |
integer code in 0:k for the above kind . |
n1, n2, ... |
integers. See the details for how many are required
(which depends on rng.kind ). |
The currently available RNG kinds are given below. kind
is
partially matched to this list. The default is
"Mersenne-Twister"
.
"Wichmann-Hill"
.Random.seed[-1] == r[1:3]
is an integer vector of
length 3, where each r[i]
is in 1:(p[i] - 1)
, where
p
is the length 3 vector of primes, p = (30269, 30307,
30323)
.
The Wichmann–Hill generator has a cycle length of
6.9536e12 (=
prod(p-1)/4
, see Applied Statistics (1984)
33, 123 which corrects the original article)."Marsaglia-Multicarry"
:"Super-Duper"
:We use the implementation by Reeds et al. (1982–84).
The two seeds are the Tausworthe and congruence long integers,
respectively. A one-to-one mapping to S's .Random.seed[1:12]
is possible but we will not publish one, not least as this generator
is not exactly the same as that in recent versions of S-PLUS.
"Mersenne-Twister":
"Knuth-TAOCP":
X[j] = (X[j-100] - X[j-37]) mod 2^30
and the “seed” is the set of the 100 last numbers (actually recorded as 101 numbers, the last being a cyclic shift of the buffer). The period is around 2^129.
"Knuth-TAOCP-2002":
"user-supplied":
Random.user
for details.
normal.kind
can be "Kinderman-Ramage"
,
"Buggy Kinderman-Ramage"
,
"Ahrens-Dieter"
, "Box-Muller"
, "Inversion"
(the
default), or
"user-supplied"
. (For inversion, see the reference in
qnorm
.)
The Kinderman-Ramage generator used in versions prior
to 1.7.1 had several approximation errors and should only be used for
reproduction of older results.
set.seed
uses its single integer argument to set as many seeds
as are required. It is intended as a simple way to get quite different
seeds by specifying small integer arguments, and also as a way to get
valid seed sets for the more complicated methods (especially
"Mersenne-Twister"
and "Knuth-TAOCP"
).
.Random.seed
is an integer
vector whose first
element codes the kind of RNG and normal generator. The lowest
two decimal digits are in 0:(k-1)
where k
is the number of available RNGs. The hundreds
represent the type of normal generator (starting at 0
).
In the underlying C, .Random.seed[-1]
is unsigned
;
therefore in R .Random.seed[-1]
can be negative, due to
the representation of an unsigned integer by a signed integer.
RNGkind
returns a two-element character vector of the RNG and
normal kinds in use before the call, invisibly if either
argument is not NULL
. RNGversion
returns the same
information.
set.seed
returns NULL
, invisibly.
Initially, there is no seed; a new one is created from the current time when one is required. Hence, different sessions will give different simulation results, by default.
.Random.seed
saves the seed set for the uniform random-number
generator, at least for the system generators. It does not
necessarily save the state of other generators, and in particular does
not save the state of the Box–Muller normal generator. If you want
to reproduce work later, call set.seed
rather than set
.Random.seed
.
The object .Random.seed
is only looked for in the user's
workspace.
All the supplied uniform generators return 32-bit integer values that are converted to doubles, so they take at most 2^32 distinct values and long runs will return duplicated values.
of RNGkind: Martin Maechler. Current implementation, B. D. Ripley
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988)
The New S Language.
Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. (set.seed
, storing in .Random.seed
.)
Wichmann, B. A. and Hill, I. D. (1982) Algorithm AS 183: An Efficient and Portable Pseudo-random Number Generator, Applied Statistics, 31, 188–190; Remarks: 34, 198 and 35, 89.
De Matteis, A. and Pagnutti, S. (1993) Long-range Correlation Analysis of the Wichmann-Hill Random Number Generator, Statist. Comput., 3, 67–70.
Marsaglia, G. (1997) A random number generator for C. Discussion
paper, posting on Usenet newsgroup sci.stat.math
on
September 29, 1997.
Reeds, J., Hubert, S. and Abrahams, M. (1982–4) C implementation of SuperDuper, University of California at Berkeley. (Personal communication from Jim Reeds to Ross Ihaka.)
Marsaglia, G. and Zaman, A. (1994) Some portable very-long-period random number generators. Computers in Physics, 8, 117–121.
Matsumoto, M. and Nishimura, T. (1998)
Mersenne Twister: A 623-dimensionally equidistributed uniform
pseudo-random number generator,
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation,
8, 3–30.
Source code at http://www.math.keio.ac.jp/~matumoto/emt.html.
Knuth, D. E. (1997)
The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 2, third edition.
Source code at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html.
Knuth, D. E. (2002)
The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 2, third edition, ninth
printing.
See http://Sunburn.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/news02.html.
Kinderman, A. J. and Ramage, J. G. (1976) Computer generation of normal random variables. Journal of the American Statistical Association 71, 893-896.
Ahrens, J.H. and Dieter, U. (1973) Extensions of Forsythe's method for random sampling from the normal distribution. Mathematics of Computation 27, 927-937.
Box, G.E.P. and Muller, M.E. (1958) A note on the generation of normal random deviates. Annals of Mathmatical Statistics 29, 610–611.
## the default random seed is 626 integers, so only print a few runif(1); .Random.seed[1:6]; runif(1); .Random.seed[1:6] ## If there is no seed, a "random" new one is created: rm(.Random.seed); runif(1); .Random.seed[1:6] RNGkind("Wich")# (partial string matching on 'kind') ## This shows how 'runif(.)' works for Wichmann-Hill, ## using only R functions: p.WH <- c(30269, 30307, 30323) a.WH <- c( 171, 172, 170) next.WHseed <- function(i.seed = .Random.seed[-1]) { (a.WH * i.seed) %% p.WH } my.runif1 <- function(i.seed = .Random.seed) { ns <- next.WHseed(i.seed[-1]); sum(ns / p.WH) %% 1 } rs <- .Random.seed (WHs <- next.WHseed(rs[-1])) u <- runif(1) stopifnot( next.WHseed(rs[-1]) == .Random.seed[-1], all.equal(u, my.runif1(rs)) ) ## ---- .Random.seed ok <- RNGkind() RNGkind("Super")#matches "Super-Duper" RNGkind() .Random.seed # new, corresponding to Super-Duper ## Reset: RNGkind(ok[1]) ## ---- sum(duplicated(runif(1e6))) # around 110 ## and we would expect about almost sure duplicates beyond about qbirthday(1-1e-6, classes=2e9) # 235,000