[R] density with weights missing values

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12/07/2021 1:22 p.m., matthias-gondan wrote:
> You're right, of course. Extrapolating your argument a bit, the whole practice of na.rm is questionable, since there's always a reason for missingness (that is not in x and rarely elsewhere in the data)Best wishes Matthias

For what it's worth, I partly agree with you:  if you specify na.rm = 
TRUE, it shouldn't make your x and weights vectors incompatible.

Regarding the warning about the sum of weights:  perhaps there's some 
reason that someone would want to create an unnormalized density, and 
that lets you do it.  An unnormalized mean doesn't make any sense, so I 
wouldn't call it a design flaw that the weighted density behaves 
differently than the weighted mean.  On the other hand, it would likely 
make more sense to normalize the density, and that's how I hope I would 
have designed it.

Thinking about this, I guessed density() was a really old function, so 
this was a case of trying to be S-compatible, but it turns out the 
weights argument was added in 2005 in r34130, so perhaps someone still 
remembers what the thinking was.

Duncan Murdoch

P.S.  I think you're posting in HTML, which makes your messages look 
really messy.  If you can turn that off, they'd be clearer.