My gut feeling is that stacked dotplots would have given you the same insight. In general terms it's about getting the right tool for the right job. My comment was about the order of choosing rather than ignoring totally. If I recall correctly the article about dot plots was about old fashioned hand drawn dot plots where dots were either stacked above each other or if more appropriate next to each other as near as possible to where they should be located on the axis. This results in a pattern that looks very similar to the histogram. The argument being made if I recall correctly is that if you choose the wrong bins for a histogram you may well end up with the same type of result that you had with the densityplot.
My practical way of looking at this is to look at what happens to the overall shape of the histogram when you change the bins. The issue is how quickly and reliably do you get to the "truth" using the various techniques. As you've noted the density plot doesn't seem to deal with some types of data as well as it does others. So when I am looking at data I use a variety of methods, and histograms come later than rugplots or density plots, but I tend to do both of those together. I'm just learning and welcome guidance in a field that I do not claim expertise in. _________________________________________________ Tom Mulholland Senior Policy Officer WA Country Health Service 189 Royal St, East Perth, WA, 6004 Tel: (08) 9222 4062 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The contents of this e-mail transmission are confidential an...{{dropped}} ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help