[R] lines(lowess()) trouble

[ivo welch]

hi:    apologies for taking up everyone's time.  my problem is probably 
documented somewhere, but I again cannot find it.  (which reminds me: I cannot 
find a search engine that allows me to search the archives of this very useful 
mailing list.)

* it seems that lines(lowess()) fails to plot certain line segments.  (and, 
what does it do at the x-min and x-max of a data set?)  Rather than speculate 
what causes it, I am including a short R snippet and a short data set that 
demonstrates it.  is this a bug or a feature?

* it would be nice if lowess was a little better documented.  I have easy 
access to Becker-Chambers-Wilks, but not to JASA and AS.  I wish "?lowess" 
would tell me a little more about the method.

thanks in advance.

regards, /iaw

-------- test.R
test <- read.table(file="test.txt", sep="\t", header=T);
plot( test$x, test$y, log="xy");
lines( lowess( test$x, test$y, f=0.5 ) );

-------- test.txt
x	y
5584440	5000
2300100	1
37320	3977
92500	1
38440	1
70000	1
161282	151759
963000	7453
200000	5000
162000	1
29100	1200
20000	1
7921000	8112906
100000	1
426500	1
200000	1
450000	1
1900000	1
220001	2000
109901	13463
16300	6965