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I am very new to Statistics and R. Maybe this is a very trivial question, but I don't really understand
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how this works.
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Suppose I use dnorm(5, 0, 2.5) . What does that mean?
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I saw some resources where they told that this function computes the height of the point in the and gathering computer history
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density curve.
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Now again I read that the exact probability of a number is 0 in continuous distribution. So, my
TEAMS What’s this? question is if I can find out the height or probability of a certain value, then how come it is 0? New Feature: Table Support

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I know I have mixed up some concepts. But I'm unable to find where I'm wrong. It will be great if Hot Meta Posts
you spare your time to make me understand this. Thanks in advance.
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share edit follow asked Jan 28 '18 at 4:08
11 Was it correct to upvote this answer which
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1 Answer Active Oldest Votes

The density returns a number that in itself does not translate directly into a probability. But it gives
the height of a curve that, if drawn over the full range of possible numbers, has the area
7 underneath it that adds up to 1.

Consider this. If I make the vector x of evenly spaced numbers from -7.5 to 7.5, 0.1 apart, and get
the density of a normal variable with mean 0 and standard deviation 2.5 for each value of x .

x <- seq(from = -7.5, to = 7.55, by = 0.1)

y <- dnorm(x, 0, 2.5)
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The approximate value of the area under the curve formed by those densities (which I have stored
as y ), multiplied by their distance apart (0.1) is nearly 1: Looking for a job?
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If you did this properly with calculus rather than approximating it with numbers, it would be exactly java multithreading

one.
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Why is this useful? The cumulative area under parts of the curve can be used to estimate the Mumbai, India
probability of the variable coming anywhere in a particular range, even though as one of your
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sources points out, the chance of any precise number is technically zero for a continuous variable.
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Consider this graphic. The area of the shaded space shows the chance of a variable from your JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.
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library(ggplot2)
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d <- data.frame(x, y) django javascript

ggplot(d, aes(x = x, y = y)) +

geom_line() + View more jobs on Stack Overflow
geom_point() +
geom_ribbon(fill = "steelblue", aes(ymax = y), ymin = 0, alpha = 0.5, data = subset(d, x <= 4)) +
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annotate("text", x= -4, y = 0.13, label = "Each point is an individual density\nestimate of dnorm(x, 0, 2.5)") +
annotate("text", x = -.3, y = 0.02, label = "Filled area under the curve shows the cumulative probability\nof getting a number as
ggtitle("Density of a random normal variable with mean zero and standard deviation 2.5")2 Best way to plot smooth normal distribution
in ggplot

share edit follow answered Jan 28 '18 at 4:38

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Peter Ellis
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1 Wooow! Thanks a ton! This made things super clear.. :) – pratyay Jan 28 '18 at 4:41 1307 How to join (merge) data frames (inner,
outer, left, right)
What happens if the mean is a matrix? I have some code that has x as a vector (1x315) and the mean is a
matrix (315x315) and the standard deviation is a vector of size 1x99225 I can't figure out why that works. 2470 How to make a great R reproducible
It returns a matrix of size 315x315. – Math4Life Dec 27 '18 at 19:47 example

1 Hi @Math4Life that sounds like it needs a separate question – Peter Ellis Jan 21 '19 at 3:04 1 how to find upper limit of integral if area is
known in R?
Hi, @PeterEllis. Great answer. How do I interpret that dnorm(1.12, mean = 1.0888677, sd =
0.030749282) is equal to 7.771136 ? Shouldn't the output of dnorm be between 0 and 1? – Krantz 2 Having Trouble Visualizing a T-Distribution
Feb 13 '19 at 14:04 in Python

2 IQR and Quartiles are not generated as

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expected in R

2 Estimating probability density in a range

Your Answer between two x values on simulated data

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