How to automate the detection of break points for use in cut

Obviously, cut would do the job if one knows the number of intervals in
advance, which I assume I won't. I guess what I'm looking for is a function
that figures out the number of intervals and their boundaries.

Sebastien

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 3:29 AM, S?bastien Bihorel<pomchip at free.fr>  wrote:

Dear R-users,

I would like to know if there is a function (in base R or the extension
packages) that would automatically detect the break points in a vector x
for later use in the cut function. The idea is to determine the boundaries
of the n intervals (n>=1) delimiting clusters of data points which could be
considered "reasonably" close, given a numerical vector x with unknown
content and unknown multimodal distribution.

For instance, given for the vector x defined by set.seed(1234); x<-
sort(c(rnorm(20,-1,0.1),rnorm(
10,5,0.1),rnorm(10,100,0.1))), this function would return a vector of 4
points: min(x), one value between 20 and 5, one value between 5 and 100,
and max(x).

Thank you in advance for your suggestions.

Sebastien

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