We will now consider the code in the editor line by line to figure out what it does. Next we'll have a small exercise to make sure you understood it.

In the first line we initialize a vector. In this case, we created a vector of 5000 NAs called sample means50. This vector will store values generated within the for loop. NA means not available, and in this case they're used as placeholders until we fill in the values with actual sample means. NA is also often used for missing data in R.

The second line calls the for loop itself. The syntax can be loosely read as, "for every element i from 1 to 5000, run the following lines of code". You can think of i as the counter that keeps track of which loop you're on. Therefore, more precisely, the loop will run once when i=1, then once when i=2, and so on up to i=5000.

The body of the for loop is the part inside the curly braces, and this set of code is run for each value of i. Here, on every loop, we take a random sample of size 50 from area, take its mean, and store it as the ith element of sample_means50. In order to display that this is really happening, we asked R to print i at each iteration. This line of code is optional and is only used for displaying what's going on while the for loop is running.

The for loop allows us to not just run the code 5000 times, but to neatly package the results, element by element, into the empty vector that we initialized at the outset.

End of Lab Survey - Question 5

Data Analysis and Statistical Inference

Exercise instructions

Hands-on interactive exercise