Create Random Deviates of Uniform Distribution in R Programming - runif() Function

runif() function in R Language is used to create random deviates of the uniform distribution.

Syntax: 

runif(n, min, max)

Parameters: 

• n: represents number of observations.
• min, max: represents lower and upper limits of the distribution. 

Example 1: 

In this example, we are generating a uniform distribution of 20 random numbers between -1 and 1 using the runif() function in R. The resulting values are evenly distributed across the specified range and are printed for inspection.

x <- runif(20, min = -1, max = 1)
print(x)

Output:

[1] 0.90453974 -0.97083088 0.83531295 0.19008941 0.52278078 -0.75730955
[7] 0.21659920 -0.26621211 0.11967620 0.42081991 0.75518470 -0.41519833
[13] -0.03734007 0.57365077 0.76156708 0.97314141 -0.41957919 -0.08910355
[19] 0.29047038 -0.67069856

Example 2: 

In this example, we are generating 10,000 random values from a uniform distribution between -5 and 5, and visualizing them with a histogram. We also overlay the theoretical probability density function to illustrate how the generated data aligns with the expected uniform distribution.

unif <- runif(10000, min = -5, max = 5)

png(file = "runifGFG.png")

hist(unif, freq = FALSE, 
     xlab = 'x',  
     ylim = c(0, 0.4),
     xlim = c(-6, 6),
     density = 20,
     main = "Uniform distribution for the interval [-5, 5]")

curve(dunif(x, min = -5, max = 5), 
      from = -10, to = 10, 
      n = 100000, 
      col = "darkgreen", 
      lwd = 2, 
      add = TRUE, 
      yaxt = "n",
      ylab = 'probability')

dev.off()

Output: