Dear mailing list,

I desperately need help on making a small program that is trying to find the 
likelihood of a distribution. Anyone that has any ideas please feel free to 
suggest them.

Ok this is what I have done so far:

I wanted 20 random numbers that were normally distributed, and I did this by 
typing x<-rnorm(20).
 I then wanted to change any negative values in the data set to zero and I 
did this by x[x<0]<-0.
These numbers have come from the normal density 
1/sigma(2pi)1/2exp-{(x-mew)2/2sigma2}, what I want to do now and having 
trouble with is that for each of these results (which can be substituted back 
into the x in the eqation above) is to multiply all 20 results (in the above 
equation form) together to form the likelihood. However the critical problem 
that I am experiencing is that for each case I do not know the mew and sigma 
eventhough that i know tthe x value. The reason why i dont know the values of 
sigma and mew is because after I have formed the program i want to use nlmin( 
  ,   ) to basically maximse the the likelihood so i find the values for mew 
and sigma, this is what i am aiming finally to do.
My pathetic effort so far is:  
                                                 
prod(dnorm(x,mean=mu,sd=sigma)

However I know that this doesn't incorporate the fact that mew and sigma are 
not known as when i input this it says that mu is not recognised but I dont 
know how to make mu and sigma different to each other.

If anyone has any ideas please feel free to suggest them as I will basically 
try anything.

Yours Faithfully,

James Hutton

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