As others have told you, you can't. You can talk about a uniform distribution on the reals but there's no way to normlize it so it integrates to 1, so it's an "improper" distribution, and there is no way to sample from those.

Duncan Murdoch

On 2025-07-28 12:30 p.m., Daniel Lobo wrote:
Many thanks for your guidance. However my original problem is, how to
select n points in the Real line randomly without any preference of
any particular probability distribution?

On Mon, 28 Jul 2025 at 21:45, Rui Barradas <ruipbarra...@sapo.pt> wrote:

On 7/28/2025 5:00 PM, Daniel Lobo wrote:
Hi,

I want to draw a set of random number from Uniform distribution where
Support is the entire Real line.

runif(4, min = -Inf, max = Inf)

However it produces all NAN

Could you please help with the right approach?

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Hello,


What you are asking doesn't make sense.
The uniform distribution's PDF is

f(x;a, b) = 1/abs(b - a) if x in [a, b]
              0            otherwise

So what you have is 1/abs(Inf - -Inf) = 1/abs(Inf) = 0.

And the cumulative distribution function is even worse, it will give you
the indeterminate Inf/Inf.
See the Wikipedia on the uniform distribution [1].


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_uniform_distribution

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Reply via email to