I wasn't suggesting that much detail, but I think the addition of one sentence in the last paragraph of the Details section would make it the meaning of "the number is a suggestion only" clearer.
"These functions provide a suggested number of bins that may be modified to produce 'round' breakpoints covering the range of the values in x." Added just before the last sentence, "Alternatively, . . ." Also pretty() could be added to the See Also section. David Carlson -----Original Message----- From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch.dun...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2013 7:00 PM To: dcarl...@tamu.edu Cc: 'philippe massicotte'; 'Rui Barradas'; 'r-help@R-project.org' Subject: Re: [R] Histogram On 13-09-04 4:44 PM, David Carlson wrote:> Good question. It turns out that the manual page does not tell > the whole story. Do you really think the manual page would be improved if it went into as much detail as you give below? It does say clearly that breaks is a "suggestion only". I don't think it would be clearer if it explained exactly how the suggestion is used. It would just be more complicated, and less likely to be read. Duncan Murdoch Looking at the source code for hist.default, > the function starts with the number of breaks suggested by > nclass.Sturges(), but then this number (or any other number of > breaks that you specify) is passed to pretty() along with the > maximum and the minimum values of the data (ie range(data)) to > create "pretty" break intervals. In your example, > nclass.Sturges() always recommends 8 breaks, but the number of > the breaks changes based on the minimum and maximum values. So > the only way to get exactly the number of breaks you want is to > specify the break intervals yourself. > > David Carlson > > > -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org > [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of philippe > massicotte > Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2013 3:02 PM > To: Rui Barradas > Cc: r-help@R-project.org > Subject: Re: [R] Histogram > > Thank you everyone. > Try executing this: > replicate(100, length(hist(rnorm(100), nclass = 10)$counts)) > I'm still not sure why the number of bins (classes) is not > consistent. > Thank in advance. > >> Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 20:27:36 +0100 >> From: ruipbarra...@sapo.pt >> To: pmassico...@hotmail.com >> CC: r-help@r-project.org >> Subject: Re: [R] Histogram >> >> Hello, >> >> See the arguments 'right' and 'include.lowest' of ?hist. >> To give what you want, try instead >> >> h1 <- hist(1:10, 10) # counts are 2, 1, 1, ... >> h2 <- hist(1:10, breaks = 0:10) # all counts are 1 >> >> >> and see the difference between h1 and h2, components 'breaks' > and 'counts'. >> >> Hope this helps, >> >> Rui Barradas >> >> Em 04-09-2013 19:34, philippe massicotte escreveu: >>> Hi everyone. >>> I'm currently translating some Matlab code into R. However, > I realized that the hsit function produce different results in > both languages. >>> in Matlab, hist(1:10, 10) will produce 10 bins with a count > of 1 in each, but in R it will produce 9 classes with count of > 2,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1. >>> I'm a bit embarrassed to ask such question, but why R is not > producing 10 classes as requested? >>> Thanks in advance,Phil >>> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >>> >>> ______________________________________________ >>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >>> PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible > code. >>> > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible > code. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.