I referred in my reply to a paper by Diaconis and Sturmfels. The exact reference is: Diaconis and Sturmfels, Algebraic algorithms for sampling from conditional distributions, Ann. Stat 26 (1998) 363-397. They cite the following: Besag and Clifford, Generalized Monte Carlo significance tests, Biometrika 76 (1989) 633-42. which actually contains your problem (section 3, Testing the Rasch model) and gives a very simple Markov chain for sampling from the uniform distribution on these matrices. If you need other than the uniform distribution, see the modifications Diaconis and Sturmfels make (the "Metropolis" step). Reid Huntsinger -----Original Message----- From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Huntsinger, Reid Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 10:50 AM To: 'Michela Marignani'; r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: RE: [R] Request for help Persi Diaconis and Bernd Sturmfels have an article on generating random contingency tables uniformly distributed subject to having fixed marginals for the same purpose (null distribution of conditional test) and they used Markov Chain Monte Carlo to sample. That could perhaps be adapted here. The article is in Annals of Statistics from several years ago, and if you google for "algebraic statistics" you'll probably find several recent expositions of the ideas, possibly even code. Reid Huntsinger -----Original Message----- From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Michela Marignani Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 3:52 AM To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: [R] Request for help My name is Michela Marignani and I'm an ecologist trying to solve a problem linked to knight' s tour algorithm. I need a program to create random matrices with presence/absence (i.e. 1,0 values), with defined colums and rows sums, to create null models for statistical comparison of species distribution phenomena. I've seen on the web many solutions of the problem, but none provides the freedom to easily change row+colums constraint and none of them produce matrices with 1 and 0. Also, I've tryied to use R, but it is too complicated for a not-statistician as I am....can you help me? Thank you for your attention, so long Michela Marignani University of Siena Environmental Science Dept. Siena, Italy michela.marignani at uniroma1.it ______________________________________________ R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html ______________________________________________ R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments,...{{dropped}}