When I call rnorm passing a single value as mean, it's obvious what happens: a value is generated from Normal(10,1).
y <- rnorm(20, mean=10, sd=1)
But, I see examples of a whole vector being passed to rnorm (or rcauchy, etc..); in this case, I am not sure what the R machinery really does. For example:
a = c(10,22,33,44,5,10,30,22,100,45,97)
y <- rnorm(a, mean=a, sd=1)
Any ideas?
a better example:
a <- c(0,10,100)
b <- c(2,4,6)
y <- rnorm(6,a,b)
y
result
[1] -1.2261425 10.1596462 103.3857481 -0.7260817 7.0812499 97.8964131
as you can see, for the first and fourth element of y, rnorm takes the first element of a as the mean and the first element of b as the sd.
For the second and fifth element of y, rnorm takes the second element of a as the mean and the second element of b as the sd.
For the third and sixth element of y, rnorm takes the third element of a as the mean and the third element of b as the sd.
you can experiment with diferent number in the first argument of rnorm to see what is happening
For example, what is happening if you use 5 instead 6 as the first argument in calling rnorm?