I am just starting to use R, converting over from SAS. I want to estimate the upper quartile in a scatterplot of demographic rates against rainfall in a small mammal population. The data looks like this: | |* * <- point in question |* |* * |* * |* * * |* * * * * * |_______________________________________ Based on a paper by Scharf et al. in Ecology (vol 79, p448) I am trying to use the qreg package in R to estimate the upper quartile in the data. My problem is that I have relatively few data points (~40) which are mostly distributed at the low end of the x axis, and an outlier in the y direction at the high end of the x axis. I would like to find a way either by iteratively weighting the observations or by bootstrapping the regression to quantify the relationship in the mass of the data. I looked in the manual for qreg, and while it allows for weights, there is no guidance for routines to calculate them. I also checked the help archives and on the web, and while I found a bit on the web, I didnt see much that was specific to my problem. It seems like this would be a general issue when working with naturally occurring phenomena (like rainfall) as there will often be few data points at the extremes. Any suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks, Chris -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._