[R] R hist density wrong?

Luca Cerone luca.cerone at gmail.com
Wed Nov 18 09:49:00 CET 2015


Dear all,
this is probably a very naive question but I can't understand what
hist() means by density.

A very simple example:

h <- hist(c(1,1,2,3), plot=F)

h$counts
[1] 2 1 0 1

h$density
[1] 1.0 0.5 0.0 0.5

The counts are as I expect, but density is quite puzzling for me.

I would have expected to obtain the probability of that bin (i.e. 0.5,
0.25, 0, 0.25),
but I can't understand how those numbers come out.

Sometimes sum(h$density) is equal to 1 as I would expect, though.

What am I misunderstanding here?

Thanks a lot for the help!

Cheers,
Luca



More information about the R-help mailing list