Dear All,

I am a undergraduate using R for the first time. It seems like an excellent
program and one that I look forward to using a lot over the next few years,
but I have hit a very basic problem that I can't solve.

I want to produce a standardised histogram, i.e. one where the area under
the graph is equal to 1. I look at the manual for the histogram function and
find this:

    freq: logical; if 'TRUE', the histogram graphic is a representation
          of frequencies, the 'counts' component of the result; if
          'FALSE', probability densities, component 'density', are
          plotted (so that the histogram has a total area of one).
          Defaults to 'TRUE' _iff_ 'breaks' are equidistant (and
          'probability' is not specified).

I therefore expect that the following command:

> h <- hist(StockReturns, freq=FALSE)

where StockReturns has the following data in it:

> sourcedata$StockReturns
 [1] -0.006983  0.111565  0.053782  0.027966  0.068956  0.165424 -0.022133
 [8] -0.001910  0.052174  0.072589 -0.023002  0.000521 -0.015688  0.148459
[15]  0.054111  0.141044  0.096686 -0.012256 -0.030397  0.039365  0.021407
[22] -0.175750  0.053901 -0.095730  0.129717  0.333333  0.061563  0.085052
[29]  0.072295 -0.008500  0.100000  0.020000 -0.199763  0.081856  0.013636
[36]  0.007812  0.038647 -0.026945  0.037965 -0.079889  0.056234 -0.083333
[43] -0.012792  0.131711  0.015996  0.008149  0.104568  0.004046 -0.027750
[50]  0.050802  0.045714  0.092327 -0.017857  0.022574  0.083333  0.051366
[57]  0.004215  0.083228  0.046803  0.021335  0.023797  0.094891  0.036541
[64]  0.016423 -0.126365  0.034219  0.098330  0.079292 -0.009901  0.021559
[71] -0.039414  0.114286  0.101856 -0.010452  0.111111  0.097274  0.104843
[78]  0.144439  0.021868  0.106667  0.081250  0.002097  0.073302  0.087889
[85] -0.145165  0.014592  0.035000  0.131711 -0.126937  0.133989

would result in a graph that has an area of equal to 1.000. However, it does
not - it produces frequency densities not standardized frequency densities.
Can someone point me in the right direction here - I know I am being
fantastically thick but can't find out how to do such a simple operation!

My complete set of commands looks like this:

> sourcedata <- read.table("c:/data.dat",header=T)
> attach(sourcedata)
> h <- hist(StockReturns, col='red', labels=TRUE, ylab="Frequency Density",
probability=TRUE)

Where c:\data.dat is a file with the numbers above it, one per line, and the
first line containing the string "StockReturns".

Many thanks,

Alex Davies

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