title: Generate positive real numbers from rpois()
body: <p>I am trying to create a Poisson simulation using <code>rpois()</code>. I have a distribution of two decimal place interest rates and I want to find out if these have Poisson rather than a normal distribution.</p>
  
  <p>The <code>rpois()</code> function returns positive integers. I want it to return two decimal place positive numbers instead. I have tried the following</p>
  
  <pre><code>set.seed(123)
  trialA &lt;- rpois(1000, 13.67) # generate 1000 numbers
  mean(trialA)
  13.22 # Great! Close enough to 13.67
  var(trialA)
  13.24 # terrific! mean and variance should be the same
  head(trialA, 4) 
  6 7 8 14 # Oh no!! I want numbers with two decimals places...??????
  
  # Here is my solution...but it has a problem
  
  # 1) Scale the initial distribution by multiplying lambda by 100
  
  trialB &lt;- rpois(1000, 13.67 * 100)
  
  # 2) Then, divide the result by 100 so I get a fractional component
  trialB &lt;- trialB / 100
  head(trialB, 4) # check results
  13.56 13.62 13.26 13.44 # terrific !
  
  # check summary results
  mean(trialB)
  13.67059  # as expected..great!
  var(trialB)
  0.153057 # oh no!! I want it to be close to: mean(trialB) = 13.67059
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I use <code>rpois()</code> to generate positive two decimal place numbers that have a Poisson distribution.  </p>
  
  <p>I know that Poisson distributions are used for counts and that counts are positive integers but I also believe that Poisson distributions can be used to model rates. And these rates could be just positive integers divided by a scalar.    </p>