Physics307L F08:People/Mondragon/Poisson/Notebook/20071217

Still some planning and thinking

what poisson_rnd(lambda, r, c) does

Octave's poisson_rnd(lambda, r, c) generates a matrix with [math]\displaystyle{ r }[/math] rows and [math]\displaystyle{ c }[/math] columns of random integers sampled from a Poisson distribution with parameter [math]\displaystyle{ lambda }[/math], lambda being the parameter [math]\displaystyle{ \lambda }[/math] in the equation

[math]\displaystyle{ P(k;\lambda)=\frac{\lambda^k e^{-\lambda}}{k!} }[/math]

Or the Poisson probability mass distribution. [math]\displaystyle{ k }[/math] is an integer that could be in the matrix, and [math]\displaystyle{ P(k;\lambda) }[/math] is the probability that it is in the matrix.

Here is a sample of what it does:

octave:1> sample=poisson_rnd(4.793,10,12)
sample =

   5   3   5   3   7   6   2   4   6   5  10   8
   8   4  10   6   3   8   6   4   3   2   6   7
   3   5   4   3   4   1   1   2   3   2   4   4
   4   7   5   6  10   5   6   7   4   4   7   3
   5   9   2   8   6   3   2   3   2   7   3   5
   5   6   5   2   5   1   7   6   6   9   2   4
   4   3   1   3   6   4   2   1   9   2   3   8
   5   3   5   4   0   3   2   6   3   6   0   6
  10   5   5   3   7   4   4   0   7   6   2   4
   2   6   6   2   3   3   7   6   6   7   2   7

plots

plot(sample) plots the columns of sample against the row index, which I guess could be useful later on, but not right now.