Expected value in matlab?

How to find expected value E[X]=_____ for a given data set X ?

suppose take X=[5 7 8 4 5 2 1 0 -5 -9 0 -7 1 2 -3 -7 -9 0 1 4 2 7 5 6 1 3]

Does matlab mean() is equal to expected value E[X] ?

Answer 1

[Andrew Newell]

In general, no. It depends on the statistical distribution for these numbers (see, for example, the Wikipedia article). Do you know what your distribution is?

EDIT: Suppose your distribution is that you are equally likely to have any integer from -9 to 9. That's 19 numbers. The expectation for the random number would be

E = (-9:9)/19
ans =

     0

However, if you have a set of numbers like your X that are sampled from this distribution, the mean of these numbers estimates E. In this case,

mean(X)
ans =

    0.9231

The estimate is, of course, not exactly equal to the expected value because the sample is random.

[Raviteja]

Ok, if suppose if you consider two cases,

1. Gaussian distribution

2. Uniform distribution

Then how to calculate ?

[Muhammad Yasir]

how to calculate the expected value of a random matrix like this one (copied from matlab workspace):