ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how to use the R Commander to perform computations on probability distributions, to graph probability distributions, and to conduct simple random simulations.
You can throw away your statistical tables because the R Commander has extensive facilities for computing probabilities and quantiles for 13 continuous and 5 discrete distributions used in statistics, well beyond what’s typically required for a basic statistics course. The sub-menus and menu items for probability computations are under the R Commander Distributions menu (see Figure A.8 on page 205) and include the distributions shown in Table 8.1. In addition to these probability distributions, the Distributions menu includes an item for setting R’s random-number generator seed (discussed in Section 8.3). None of the menu items in the Distributions menu requires an active data set, but the menu items for sampling from distributions create simulated data sets.
