[R] breaks in hist()

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Maarten van Gelder wrote:
> 
> > Sorry, I forgot to mention in my earlier post that I run version 1.2.3 on
> > NT4.0
> 
> Thanks: hist has been changed several times recently.
> 
> > I was using the hist() function to create a frequency table of some network
> > traffic data. The range in values is rather large, from 0 till just under
> > 10e12. Calling hist(x, breaks=c(0,1000,1e6,1e9,1e12),plot=F,freq=T) causes
> > hist() to return :
> >
> > $breaks
> > [1] -1.0000e+05  1.0100e+05  1.1000e+06  1.0001e+09  1.0000e+12
> >
> > Is this recalculation of the breaks by hist() intended?
> 
> Yes.  You have got caught by the following:
> 
>     fuzz <- if (right)
>         c(if (include.lowest) -diddle else diddle, rep(diddle, length(breaks) - 1))
>     else c(rep(-diddle, length(breaks) - 1), if (include.lowest) diddle else -diddle)
>     breaks <- breaks + fuzz
> 
> Don't you want to use log10 scale?
> 

or just table(cut(x,breaks=c(0,1000,1e6,1e9,1e12)))

Basically, just don't expect hist() to do sensible things with things
that cannot sensibly be plotted. (Your first column would have a width
of one billionth of the total scale, whereas the last one takes up
99.9% of the total!)

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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