ABSTRACT
Many of the methods in computational statistics require the ability to generate random variables from known probability distributions. This is at the heart of Monte Carlo simulation for statistical inference (Chapter 6), bootstrap and resampling methods (Chapters 6 and 7), Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques (Chapter 11), and the analysis of spatial point processes (Chapter 12). In addition, we use simulated random variables to explain many other topics in this book, such as exploratory data analysis (Chapter 5), density estimation (Chapter 8), and statistical pattern recognition (Chapter 9).
