Re: monte carlo analysis

[thompson(at)orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov (William Thompson)]

charliesolomon@my-deja.com writes:

>Hello ng,

>Does anyone have experience with monte carlo analysis in IDL?  I'm just
>starting to research it and would appreciate any insights or pointers
>in the right direction.  The purpose would be to take an existing
>scientific model and run gads of iterations, using different
>distributions for the input variables to get statistical results.
>Thanks,

>Charlie Solomon
>csolomon@usc.edu

The trick with Monte Carlo analysis is to generate a properly randomized set of
test particles with the correct characteristics.  There was some discussion a
while back about the properties of the random number generators in IDL.  You
might check out www.dejanews.com, for example

http://x45.deja.com/[ST_rn=if]/getdoc.xp?AN=509839686&CONTEXT=945475070.1365508166&hitnum=12

Other than that, Monte Carlo is a fairly straightforward process.  IDL may not
be the best language to implement it in, though, because of all the looping
you'll probably need to do.

William Thompson