[R] Percent damage distribution

[Ben Bolker]

diegol <diegol81 <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> 
> R version: 2.7.0
> Running on: WinXP
> 
> I am trying to model damage from fire losses (given that the loss occurred).
> Since I have the individual insured amounts, rather than sampling dollar
> damage from a continuous distribution ranging from 0 to infinity, I want to
> sample from a percent damage distribution from 0-100%. One obvious solution
> is to use runif(n, min=0, max=1), but this does not seem to be a good idea,
> since I would not expect damage to be uniform.
> 


 Beta distribution (rbeta(...)) or
logistic-binomial distribution
plogis(rnorm(...)) .

  See e.g. 

Smithson, Michael, and Jay Verkuilen. 2006. A better lemon squeezer?
Maximum-likelihood regression with beta-distributed dependent variables.
Psychological Methods 11, no. 1 (March): 54-71. doi:2006-03820-004.