(Checked with
WinS+3.3 under Win3.11
WinS+4.0 under Win95
UnixS+ Version 3.2 Release 1 for Sun SPARC, SunOS 5.x : 1993 )
method="constant" means that instead of linear approximation a
fixed mixture of the nearest lower and the nearest higher value
is estimated, where f determines the relative weights for these two
neighbour values. E.g. f=0 means to take the lower value, but if xout
equals the lower x, not the corresponding y is returned but the
y corresponding to the lower neighbour of the lower x, in numbers:
assume
x: 1 2 3 4
y: 1 2 3 4
indeed asking for
2 < xout < 3
correctly returns 2
BUT
asking for xout=2 returns yout=1
AND
asking for xout=3 returns yout=2
which seems not to be a reasonable approximation at these borders
if you prefer graphics look at
x <- 1:4
y <- 1:4
x2 <- seq(1,4,0.25)
plot(x,y, pch=1, cex=1.5)
points(approx(x,y,x2, method="constant", f=0), pch=15, cex=1)
points(approx(x,y,x2, method="constant", f=0.5), pch=15, cex=0.5, col=2)
where you furthermore will discover that the questionable
"rule" used is not consequently applied at the leftmost value:
asking for xout=1 returns 1 (and not NA)
If there is no reasonable reason to keep this,
I recommend to MATHSOFT to fix this.
BTW, in R this is fixed already.
Best regards
Jens Oehlschlaegel-Akiyoshi
--
Jens Oehlschlaegel-Akiyoshi
Psychologist/Statistician
CURRENT ADDRESS (until 12/98) | PERMANENT VIRTUAL ADDRESS
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