transforming the distribution of variables

Hello,

Would anybody know if there is a function in matlab to transform a continuous random variable x to a uniform distribution by using a cumulative distribution function (cdf) transformation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_integral_transform

Any comments and suggestions welcome.

Thank you

John

Answer 1

[Oleg Komarov]

You can call cdf specifying the type of distribution or you can call directly the specific distribution function. For a list of supported cdfs: cumulative distributions.

An example:

x = randn(1000,1);
y = normcdf(x,0,1);
hist(y,100)

[John]

Hello Oleg,

Thank you for your reply.

So as I understand this, using the cdf function returns the cumulative distribution of the data of a specified distribution.

Would you know how I could use the cdf to then transform the continuous random variable to a uniform distribution?

Apologies if this sounds like a silly question, I only have basic statistics?

Thank you

John

[Oleg Komarov]

The Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) maps some values into [0,1], i.e. uniform distribution on [0,1].