This is a presentation for the Eugene R Users Meetup on August 28, 2018.

Knowing how to simulate data in R has been incredibly useful to me in my day-to-day work. Simulating data is useful not only for exploring the long-run behavior of a statistic but also allows you to make small datasets for working out hard data manipulation tasks or for testing your intuition about a mathematical relationship or statistical model. But how does a person get started with simulations?

In this talk I will go over some of the functions R has available to help with simulating data. I'll discuss functions for random number generation, replicating elements of a vector, and repeated data generation. We'll go in depth on how to use these functions and then practice creating datasets of different shapes and sizes.

I will do interactive work in the meetup using functions_for_simulations_simple.Rmd. To download a copy so you can run the code, save the "Raw" file. (Make sure the file you save ends in .Rmd, not .txt.)

For a detailed explanation of the code along with the code and output, see the pdf document. I've included a couple of extra examples here that I didn't have time to hit on in the Meetup.