A Comparison of Statistical Tools for Identifying Modality in Body Mass Distributions

The assessment of modality or \bumps in distributions is of in- terest to scientists in many areas. We compare the performance of four statistical methods to test for departures from unimodality in simulations, and further illustrate the four methods using well-known ecological datasets on body mass published by Holling in 1992 to illustrate their advantages and disadvantages. Silverman's kernel density method was found to be very conservative....