Here we will discuss the example used by Mu¨ ller et al. (2001). For this example the reference set was made up of 744 skeletal remains using the Suchey—Brooks pubic symphysis method (Suchey et al. 1988). To estimate the weight functions we used a bandwidth of 8. When we look at the resulting plots for the weight functions,we note that there are four primary forms: monotone decreasing, monotone increasing, unimodal and bimodal. Because of these, we conclude that nonparametric forms are the best way to characterize the functional forms of the weight functions.