KernSmooth (version 2.23-22)

dpih: Select a Histogram Bin Width

Description

Uses direct plug-in methodology to select the bin width of a histogram.

Usage

dpih(x, scalest = "minim", level = 2L, gridsize = 401L, 
     range.x = range(x), truncate = TRUE)

Value

the selected bin width.

Arguments

x

numeric vector containing the sample on which the histogram is to be constructed.

scalest

estimate of scale.

"stdev" - standard deviation is used.

"iqr" - inter-quartile range divided by 1.349 is used.

"minim" - minimum of "stdev" and "iqr" is used.

level

number of levels of functional estimation used in the plug-in rule.

gridsize

number of grid points used in the binned approximations to functional estimates.

range.x

range over which functional estimates are obtained. The default is the minimum and maximum data values.

truncate

if truncate is TRUE then observations outside of the interval specified by range.x are omitted. Otherwise, they are used to weight the extreme grid points.

Background

This method for selecting the bin width of a histogram is described in Wand (1995). It is an extension of the normal scale rule of Scott (1979) and uses plug-in ideas from bandwidth selection for kernel density estimation (e.g. Sheather and Jones, 1991).

Details

The direct plug-in approach, where unknown functionals that appear in expressions for the asymptotically optimal bin width and bandwidths are replaced by kernel estimates, is used. The normal distribution is used to provide an initial estimate.

References

Scott, D. W. (1979). On optimal and data-based histograms. Biometrika, 66, 605--610.

Sheather, S. J. and Jones, M. C. (1991). A reliable data-based bandwidth selection method for kernel density estimation. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 53, 683--690.

Wand, M. P. (1995). Data-based choice of histogram binwidth. The American Statistician, 51, 59--64.

See Also

hist

Examples

data(geyser, package="MASS")
x <- geyser$duration
h <- dpih(x)
bins <- seq(min(x)-h, max(x)+h, by=h)
hist(x, breaks=bins)