Question about the output of sample on a multinomial-dist in Gamble - racket

I'm trying to understand how to use multinomial-dist in Gamble. From the Gamble documentation:
Represents a multinomial distribution. The support consists of vectors of the same length as weights representing counts of n iterated samples from the corresponding categorical distribution with weights for weights.
So if I understood correctly writing (define test (multinomial-dist 100 (vector 50 40 10))) defines a multinomial distribution in which, out of 100 samples, outcome 1 appeared 50 times, outcome 2 appeared 40 times and outcome 3 appeared 10 times. What I'm struggling to understand is that if I evaluate (sample test) I could obtain results like '#(51 88 100) and I can't really understand what these numbers mean. I know that probably is an easy question, but I really can't find the answer anywhere else. Thank you very much.

Related

Unreasonable [positive] log-likelihood values from matlab "fitgmdist" function

I want to fit a data sets with Gaussian mixture model, the data sets contains about 120k samples and each sample has about 130 dimensions. When I use matlab to do it, so I run scripts (with cluster number 1000):
gm = fitgmdist(data, 1000, 'Options', statset('Display', 'iter'), 'RegularizationValue', 0.01);
I get the following outputs:
iter log-likelihood
1 -6.66298e+07
2 -1.87763e+07
3 -5.00384e+06
4 -1.11863e+06
5 299767
6 985834
7 1.39525e+06
8 1.70956e+06
9 1.94637e+06
The log likelihood is bigger than 0! I think it's unreasonable, and don't know why.
Could somebody help me?
First of all, it is not a problem of how large your dataset is.
Here is some code that produces similar results with a quite small dataset:
options = statset('Display', 'iter');
x = ones(5,2) + (rand(5,2)-0.5)/1000;
fitgmdist(x,1,'Options',options);
this produces
iter log-likelihood
1 64.4731
2 73.4987
3 73.4987
Of course you know that the log function (the natural logarithm) has a range from -inf to +inf. I guess your problem is that you think the input to the log (i.e. the aposteriori function) should be bounded by [0,1]. Well, the aposteriori function is a pdf function, which means that its value can be very large for very dense dataset.
PDFs must be positive (which is why we can use the log on them) and must integrate to 1. But they are not bounded by [0,1].
You can verify this by reducing the density in the above code
x = ones(5,2) + (rand(5,2)-0.5)/1;
fitgmdist(x,1,'Options',options);
this produces
iter log-likelihood
1 -8.99083
2 -3.06465
3 -3.06465
So, I would rather assume that your dataset contains several duplicate (or very close) values.

How to compute & plot Equal Error Rate (EER) from FAR/FRR values using matlab

I have the following values against FAR/FRR. i want to compute EER rates and then plot in matlab.
FAR FRR
19.64 20
21.29 18.61
24.92 17.08
19.14 20.28
17.99 21.39
16.83 23.47
15.35 26.39
13.20 29.17
7.92 42.92
3.96 60.56
1.82 84.31
1.65 98.33
26.07 16.39
29.04 13.13
34.49 9.31
40.76 6.81
50.33 5.42
66.83 1.67
82.51 0.28
Is there any matlab function available to do this. can somebody explain this to me. Thanks.
Let me try to answer your question
1) For your data EER can be the mean/max/min of [19.64,20]
1.1) The idea of EER is try to measure the system performance against another system (the lower the better) by finding the equal(if not equal then at least nearly equal or have the min distance) between False Alarm Rate (FAR) and False Reject Rate (FRR, or missing rate) .
Refer to your data, [19.64,20] gives min distance, thus it could used as EER, you can take mean/max/min value of these two value, however since it means to compare between systems, thus make sure other system use the same method(mean/max/min) to pick EER value.
The difference among mean/max/min can be ignored if the there are large amount of data. In some speaker verification task, there will be 100k data sample.
2) To understand EER ,better compute it by yourself, here is how:
two things you need to know:
A) The system score for each test case (trial)
B) The true/false for each trial
After you have A and B, then you can create [trial, score,true/false] pairs then sort it by the score value, after that loop through the score, eg from min-> max. At each loop assume threshold is that score and compute the FAR,FRR. After loop through the score find the FAR,FRR with "equal" value.
For the code you can refer to my pyeer.py , in function processDataTable2
https://github.com/StevenLOL/Research_speech_speaker_verification_nist_sre2010/blob/master/SRE2010/sid/pyeer.py
This function is written for the NIST SRE 2010 evaluation.
4) There are other measures similar to EER, such as minDCF which only play with the weights of FAR and FRR. You can refer to "Performance Measure" of http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/sre10results.cfm
5) You can also refer to this package https://sites.google.com/site/bosaristoolkit/ and DETware_v2.1.tar.gz at http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tools/ for computing and plotting EER in Matlab
Plotting in DETWare_v2.1
Pmiss=1:50;Pfa=50:-1:1;
Plot_DET(Pmiss/100.0,Pfa/100.0,'r')
FAR(t) and FRR(t) are parameterized by threshold, t. They are cumulative distributions, so they should be monotonic in t. Your data is not shown to be monotonic, so if it is indeed FAR and FRR, then the measurements were not made in order. But for the sake of clarity, we can order:
FAR FRR
1 1.65 98.33
2 1.82 84.31
3 3.96 60.56
4 7.92 42.92
5 13.2 29.17
6 15.35 26.39
7 16.83 23.47
8 17.99 21.39
9 19.14 20.28
10 19.64 20
11 21.29 18.61
12 24.92 17.08
13 26.07 16.39
14 29.04 13.13
15 34.49 9.31
16 40.76 6.81
17 50.33 5.42
18 66.83 1.67
19 82.51 0.28
This is for increasing FAR, which assumes a distance score; if you have a similarity score, then FAR would be sorted in decreasing order.
Loop over FAR until it is larger than FRR, which occurs at row 11. Then interpolate the cross over value between rows 10 and 11. This is your equal error rate.

Random numbers that add to 1 with a minimum increment: Matlab

Having read carefully the previous question
Random numbers that add to 100: Matlab
I am struggling to solve a similar but slightly more complex problem.
I would like to create an array of n elements that sums to 1, however I want an added constraint that the minimum increment (or if you like number of significant figures) for each element is fixed.
For example if I want 10 numbers that sum to 1 without any constraint the following works perfectly:
num_stocks=10;
num_simulations=100000;
temp = [zeros(num_simulations,1),sort(rand(num_simulations,num_stocks-1),2),ones(num_simulations,1)];
weights = diff(temp,[],2);
I foolishly thought that by scaling this I could add the constraint as follows
num_stocks=10;
min_increment=0.001;
num_simulations=100000;
scaling=1/min_increment;
temp2 = [zeros(num_simulations,1),sort(round(rand(num_simulations,num_stocks-1)*scaling)/scaling,2),ones(num_simulations,1)];
weights2 = diff(temp2,[],2);
However though this works for small values of n & small values of increment, if for example n=1,000 & the increment is 0.1% then over a large number of trials the first and last numbers have a mean which is consistently below 0.1%.
I am sure there is a logical explanation/solution to this but I have been tearing my hair out to try & find it & wondered anybody would be so kind as to point me in the right direction. To put the problem into context create random stock portfolios (hence the sum to 1).
Thanks in advance
Thank you for the responses so far, just to clarify (as I think my initial question was perhaps badly phrased), it is the weights that have a fixed increment of 0.1% so 0%, 0.1%, 0.2% etc.
I did try using integers initially
num_stocks=1000;
min_increment=0.001;
num_simulations=100000;
scaling=1/min_increment;
temp = [zeros(num_simulations,1),sort(randi([0 scaling],num_simulations,num_stocks-1),2),ones(num_simulations,1)*scaling];
weights = (diff(temp,[],2)/scaling);
test=mean(weights);
but this was worse, the mean for the 1st & last weights is well below 0.1%.....
Edit to reflect excellent answer by Floris & clarify
The original code I was using to solve this problem (before finding this forum) was
function x = monkey_weights_original(simulations,stocks)
stockmatrix=1:stocks;
base_weight=1/stocks;
r=randi(stocks,stocks,simulations);
x=histc(r,stockmatrix)*base_weight;
end
This runs very fast, which was important considering I want to run a total of 10,000,000 simulations, 10,000 simulations on 1,000 stocks takes just over 2 seconds with a single core & I am running the whole code on an 8 core machine using the parallel toolbox.
It also gives exactly the distribution I was looking for in terms of means, and I think that it is just as likely to get a portfolio that is 100% in 1 stock as it is to geta portfolio that is 0.1% in every stock (though I'm happy to be corrected).
My issue issue is that although it works for 1,000 stocks & an increment of 0.1% and I guess it works for 100 stocks & an increment of 1%, as the number of stocks decreases then each pick becomes a very large percentage (in the extreme with 2 stocks you will always get a 50/50 portfolio).
In effect I think this solution is like the binomial solution Floris suggests (but more limited)
However my question has arrisen because I would like to make my approach more flexible & have the possibility of say 3 stocks & an increment of 1% which my current code will not handle correctly, hence how I stumbled accross the original question on stackoverflow
Floris's recursive approach will get to the right answer, but the speed will be a major issue considering the scale of the problem.
An example of the original research is here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/monkeys-stocks-study_n_3021285.html
I am currently working on extending it with more flexibility on portfolio weights & numbers of stock in the index, but it appears my programming & probability theory ability are a limiting factor.......
One problem I can see is that your formula allows for numbers to be zero - when the rounding operation results in two consecutive numbers to be the same after sorting. Not sure if you consider that a problem - but I suggest you think about it (it would mean your model portfolio has fewer than N stocks in it since the contribution of one of the stocks would be zero).
The other thing to note is that the probability of getting the extreme values in your distribution is half of what you want them to be: If you have uniformly distributed numbers from 0 to 1000, and you round them, the numbers that round to 0 were in the interval [0 0.5>; the ones that round to 1 came from [0.5 1.5> - twice as big. The last number (rounding to 1000) is again from a smaller interval: [999.5 1000]. Thus you will not get the first and last number as often as you think. If instead of round you use floor I think you will get the answer you expect.
EDIT
I thought about this some more, and came up with a slow but (I think) accurate method for doing this. The basic idea is this:
Think in terms of integers; rather than dividing the interval 0 - 1 in steps of 0.001, divide the interval 0 - 1000 in integer steps
If we try to divide N into m intervals, the mean size of a step should be N / m; but being integer, we would expect the intervals to be binomially distributed
This suggests an algorithm in which we choose the first interval as a binomially distributed variate with mean (N/m) - call the first value v1; then divide the remaining interval N - v1 into m-1 steps; we can do so recursively.
The following code implements this:
% random integers adding up to a definite sum
function r = randomInt(n, limit)
% returns an array of n random integers
% whose sum is limit
% calls itself recursively; slow but accurate
if n>1
v = binomialRandom(limit, 1 / n);
r = [v randomInt(n-1, limit - v)];
else
r = limit;
end
function b = binomialRandom(N, p)
b = sum(rand(1,N)<p); % slow but direct
To get 10000 instances, you run this as follows:
tic
portfolio = zeros(10000, 10);
for ii = 1:10000
portfolio(ii,:) = randomInt(10, 1000);
end
toc
This ran in 3.8 seconds on a modest machine (single thread) - of course the method for obtaining a binomially distributed random variate is the thing slowing it down; there are statistical toolboxes with more efficient functions but I don't have one. If you increase the granularity (for example, by setting limit=10000) it will slow down more since you increase the number of random number samples that are generated; with limit = 10000 the above loop took 13.3 seconds to complete.
As a test, I found mean(portfolio)' and std(portfolio)' as follows (with limit=1000):
100.20 9.446
99.90 9.547
100.09 9.456
100.00 9.548
100.01 9.356
100.00 9.484
99.69 9.639
100.06 9.493
99.94 9.599
100.11 9.453
This looks like a pretty convincing "flat" distribution to me. We would expect the numbers to be binomially distributed with a mean of 100, and standard deviation of sqrt(p*(1-p)*n). In this case, p=0.1 so we expect s = 9.4868. The values I actually got were again quite close.
I realize that this is inefficient for large values of limit, and I made no attempt at efficiency. I find that clarity trumps speed when you develop something new. But for instance you could pre-compute the cumulative binomial distributions for p=1./(1:10), then do a random lookup; but if you are just going to do this once, for 100,000 instances, it will run in under a minute; unless you intend to do it many times, I wouldn't bother. But if anyone wants to improve this code I'd be happy to hear from them.
Eventually I have solved this problem!
I found a paper by 2 academics at John Hopkins University "Sampling Uniformly From The Unit Simplex"
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nasmith/papers/smith+tromble.tr04.pdf
In the paper they outline how naive algorthms don't work, in a way very similar to woodchips answer to the Random numbers that add to 100 question. They then go on to show that the method suggested by David Schwartz can also be slightly biased and propose a modified algorithm which appear to work.
If you want x numbers that sum to y
Sample uniformly x-1 random numbers from the range 1 to x+y-1 without replacement
Sort them
Add a zero at the beginning & x+y at the end
difference them & subtract 1 from each value
If you want to scale them as I do, then divide by y
It took me a while to realise why this works when the original approach didn't and it come down to the probability of getting a zero weight (as highlighted by Floris in his answer). To get a zero weight in the original version for all but the 1st or last weights your random numbers had to have 2 values the same but for the 1st & last ones then a random number of zero or the maximum number would result in a zero weight which is more likely.
In the revised algorithm, zero & the maximum number are not in the set of random choices & a zero weight occurs only if you select two consecutive numbers which is equally likely for every position.
I coded it up in Matlab as follows
function weights = unbiased_monkey_weights(num_simulations,num_stocks,min_increment)
scaling=1/min_increment;
sample=NaN(num_simulations,num_stocks-1);
for i=1:num_simulations
allcomb=randperm(scaling+num_stocks-1);
sample(i,:)=allcomb(1:num_stocks-1);
end
temp = [zeros(num_simulations,1),sort(sample,2),ones(num_simulations,1)*(scaling+num_stocks)];
weights = (diff(temp,[],2)-1)/scaling;
end
Obviously the loop is a bit clunky and as I'm using the 2009 version the randperm function only allows you to generate permutations of the whole set, however despite this I can run 10,000 simulations for 1,000 numbers in 5 seconds on my clunky laptop which is fast enough.
The mean weights are now correct & as a quick test I replicated woodchips generating 3 numbers that sum to 1 with the minimum increment being 0.01% & it also look right
Thank you all for your help and I hope this solution is useful to somebody else in the future
The simple answer is to use the schemes that work well with NO minimum increment, then transform the problem. As always, be careful. Some methods do NOT yield uniform sets of numbers.
Thus, suppose I want 11 numbers that sum to 100, with a constraint of a minimum increment of 5. I would first find 11 numbers that sum to 45, with no lower bound on the samples (other than zero.) I could use a tool from the file exchange for this. Simplest is to simply sample 10 numbers in the interval [0,45]. Sort them, then find the differences.
X = diff([0,sort(rand(1,10)),1]*45);
The vector X is a sample of numbers that sums to 45. But the vector Y sums to 100, with a minimum value of 5.
Y = X + 5;
Of course, this is trivially vectorized if you wish to find multiple sets of numbers with the given constraint.

How to visualize binary data?

I have a dataset 6x1000 of binary data (6 data points, 1000 boolean dimensions).
I perform cluster analysis on it
[idx, ctrs] = kmeans(x, 3, 'distance', 'hamming');
And I get the three clusters. How can I visualize my result?
I have 6 rows of data each having 1000 attributes; 3 of them should be alike or similar in a way. Applying clustering will reveal the clusters. Since I know the number of clusters
I only need to find similar rows. Hamming distance tell us the similarity between rows and the result is correct that there are 3 clusters.
[EDIT: for any reasonable data, kmeans will always finds asked number
of clusters]
I want to take that knowledge
and make it easily observable and understandable without having to write huge explanations.
Matlab's example is not suitable since it deals with numerical 2D data while my questions concerns n-dimensional categorical data.
The dataset is here http://pastebin.com/cEWJfrAR
[EDIT1: how to check if clusters are significant?]
For more information please visit the following link:
https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/32090/discussion-between-oleg-komarov-and-justcurious
If the question is not clear ask, for anything you are missing.
For representing the differences between high-dimensional vectors or clusters, I have used Matlab's dendrogram function. For instance, after loading your dataset into the matrix x I ran the following code:
l = linkage(a, 'average');
dendrogram(l);
and got the following plot:
The height of the bar that connects two groups of nodes represents the average distance between members of those two groups. In this case it looks like (5 and 6), (1 and 2), and (3 and 4) are clustered.
If you would rather use the hamming distance rather than the euclidian distance (which linkage does by default), then you can just do
l = linkage(x, 'average', {'hamming'});
although it makes little difference to the plot.
You can start by visualizing your data with a 'barcode' plot and then labeling rows with the cluster group they belong:
% Create figure
figure('pos',[100,300,640,150])
% Calculate patch xy coordinates
[r,c] = find(A);
Y = bsxfun(#minus,r,[.5,-.5,-.5, .5])';
X = bsxfun(#minus,c,[.5, .5,-.5,-.5])';
% plot patch
patch(X,Y,ones(size(X)),'EdgeColor','none','FaceColor','k');
% Set axis prop
set(gca,'pos',[0.05,0.05,.9,.9],'ylim',[0.5 6.5],'xlim',[0.5 1000.5],'xtick',[],'ytick',1:6,'ydir','reverse')
% Cluster
c = kmeans(A,3,'distance','hamming');
% Add lateral labeling of the clusters
nc = numel(c);
h = text(repmat(1010,nc,1),1:nc,reshape(sprintf('%3d',c),3,numel(c))');
cmap = hsv(max(c));
set(h,{'Background'},num2cell(cmap(c,:),2))
Definition
The Hamming distance for binary strings a and b the Hamming distance is equal to the number of ones (population count) in a XOR b (see Hamming distance).
Solution
Since you have six data strings, so you could create a 6 by 6 matrix filled with the Hamming distance. The matrix would be symetric (distance from a to b is the same as distance from b to a) and the diagonal is 0 (distance for a to itself is nul).
For example, the Hamming distance between your first and second string is:
hamming_dist12 = sum(xor(x(1,:),x(2,:)));
Loop that and fill your matrix:
hamming_dist = zeros(6);
for i=1:6,
for j=1:6,
hamming_dist(i,j) = sum(xor(x(i,:),x(j,:)));
end
end
(And yes this code is a redundant given the symmetry and zero diagonal, but the computation is minimal and optimizing not worth the effort).
Print your matrix as a spreadsheet in text format, and let the reader find which data string is similar to which.
This does not use your "kmeans" approach, but your added description regarding the problem helped shaping this out-of-the-box answer. I hope it helps.
Results
0 182 481 495 490 500
182 0 479 489 492 488
481 479 0 180 497 517
495 489 180 0 503 515
490 492 497 503 0 174
500 488 517 515 174 0
Edit 1:
How to read the table? The table is a simple distance table. Each row and each column represent a series of data (herein a binary string). The value at the intersection of row 1 and column 2 is the Hamming distance between string 1 and string 2, which is 182. The distance between string 1 and 2 is the same as between string 2 and 1, this is why the matrix is symmetric.
Data analysis
Three clusters can readily be identified: 1-2, 3-4 and 5-6, whose Hamming distance are, respectively, 182, 180, and 174.
Within a cluster, the data has ~18% dissimilarity. By contrast, data not part of a cluster has ~50% dissimilarity (which is random given binary data).
Presentation
I recommend Kohonen network or similar technique to present your data in, say, 2 dimensions. In general this area is called Dimensionality reduction.
I you can also go simpler way, e.g. Principal Component Analysis, but there's no quarantee you can effectively remove 9998 dimensions :P
scikit-learn is a good Python package to get you started, similar exist in matlab, java, ect. I can assure you it's rather easy to implement some of these algorithms yourself.
Concerns
I have a concern over your data set though. 6 data points is really a small number. moreover your attributes seem boolean at first glance, if that's the case, manhattan distance if what you should use. I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) Hamming distance only makes sense if your attributes are somehow related, e.g. if attributes are actually a 1000-bit long binary string rather than 1000 independent 1-bit attributes.
Moreover, with 6 data points, you have only 2 ** 6 combinations, that means 936 out of 1000 attributes you have are either truly redundant or indistinguishable from redundant.
K-means almost always finds as many clusters as you ask for. To test significance of your clusters, run K-means several times with different initial conditions and check if you get same clusters. If you get different clusters every time or even from time to time, you cannot really trust your result.
I used a barcode type visualization for my data. The code which was posted here earlier by Oleg was too heavy for my solution (image files were over 500 kb) so I used image() to make the figures
function barcode(A)
B = (A+1)*2;
image(B);
colormap flag;
set(gca,'Ydir','Normal')
axis([0 size(B,2) 0 size(B,1)]);
ax = gca;
ax.TickDir = 'out'
end

How to compare different distribution means with reference truth value in Matlab?

I have production (q) values from 4 different methods stored in the 4 matrices. Each of the 4 matrices contains q values from a different method as:
Matrix_1 = 1 row x 20 column
Matrix_2 = 100 rows x 20 columns
Matrix_3 = 100 rows x 20 columns
Matrix_4 = 100 rows x 20 columns
The number of columns indicate the number of years. 1 row would contain the production values corresponding to the 20 years. Other 99 rows for matrix 2, 3 and 4 are just the different realizations (or simulation runs). So basically the other 99 rows for matrix 2,3 and 4 are repeat cases (but not with exact values because of random numbers).
Consider Matrix_1 as the reference truth (or base case ). Now I want to compare the other 3 matrices with Matrix_1 to see which one among those three matrices (each with 100 repeats) compares best, or closely imitates, with Matrix_1.
How can this be done in Matlab?
I know, manually, that we use confidence interval (CI) by plotting the mean of Matrix_1, and drawing each distribution of mean of Matrix_2, mean of Matrix_3 and mean of Matrix_4. The largest CI among matrix 2, 3 and 4 which contains the reference truth (or mean of Matrix_1) will be the answer.
mean of Matrix_1 = (1 row x 1 column)
mean of Matrix_2 = (100 rows x 1 column)
mean of Matrix_3 = (100 rows x 1 column)
mean of Matrix_4 = (100 rows x 1 column)
I hope the question is clear and relevant to SO. Otherwise please feel free to edit/suggest anything in question. Thanks!
EDIT: My three methods I talked about are a1, a2 and a3 respectively. Here's my result:
ci_a1 =
1.0e+008 *
4.084733001497999
4.097677503988565
ci_a2 =
1.0e+008 *
5.424396063219890
5.586301025525149
ci_a3 =
1.0e+008 *
2.429145282593182
2.838897116739112
p_a1 =
8.094614835195452e-130
p_a2 =
2.824626709966993e-072
p_a3 =
3.054667629953656e-012
h_a1 = 1; h_a2 = 1; h_a3 = 1
None of my CI, from the three methods, includes the mean ( = 3.454992884900722e+008) inside it. So do we still consider p-value to choose the best result?
If I understand correctly the calculation in MATLAB is pretty strait-forward.
Steps 1-2 (mean calculation):
k1_mean = mean(k1);
k2_mean = mean(k2);
k3_mean = mean(k3);
k4_mean = mean(k4);
Step 3, use HIST to plot distribution histograms:
hist([k2_mean; k3_mean; k4_mean]')
Step 4. You can do t-test comparing your vectors 2, 3 and 4 against normal distribution with mean k1_mean and unknown variance. See TTEST for details.
[h,p,ci] = ttest(k2_mean,k1_mean);
EDIT : I misinterpreted your question. See the answer of Yuk and following comments. My answer is what you need if you want to compare distributions of two vectors instead of a vector against a single value. Apparently, the latter is the case here.
Regarding your t-tests, you should keep in mind that they test against a "true" mean. Given the number of values for each matrix and the confidence intervals it's not too difficult to guess the standard deviation on your results. This is a measure of the "spread" of your results. Now the error on your mean is calculated as the standard deviation of your results divided by the number of observations. And the confidence interval is calculated by multiplying that standard error with appx. 2.
This confidence interval contains the true mean in 95% of the cases. So if the true mean is exactly at the border of that interval, the p-value is 0.05 the further away the mean, the lower the p-value. This can be interpreted as the chance that the values you have in matrix 2, 3 or 4 come from a population with a mean as in matrix 1. If you see your p-values, these chances can be said to be non-existent.
So you see that when the number of values get high, the confidence interval becomes smaller and the t-test becomes very sensitive. What this tells you, is nothing more that the three matrices differ significantly from the mean. If you have to choose one, I'd take a look at the distributions anyway. Otherwise the one with the closest mean seems a good guess. If you want to get deeper into this, you could also ask on stats.stackexchange.com
Your question and your method aren't really clear :
Is the distribution equal in all columns? This is important, as two distributions can have the same mean, but differ significantly :
is there a reason why you don't use the Central Limit Theorem? This seems to me like a very complex way of obtaining a result that can easily be found using the fact that the distribution of a mean approaches a normal distribution where sd(mean) = sd(observations)/number of observations. Saves you quite some work -if the distributions are alike! -
Now if the question is really the comparison of distributions, you should consider looking at a qqplot for a general idea, and at a 2-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test for formal testing. But please read in on this test, as you have to understand what it does in order to interprete the results correctly.
On a sidenote : if you do this test on multiple cases, make sure you understand the problem of multiple comparisons and use the appropriate correction, eg. Bonferroni or Dunn-Sidak.