lower,upper: range over which to minimize. The default is almost always satisfactory. hmax is calculated internally from a normal reference bandwidth.
method: either "ste" ("solve-the-equation") or "dpi" ("direct plug-in"). Can be abbreviated.
tol: for method "ste", the convergence tolerance for uniroot. The default leads to bandwidth estimates with only slightly more than one digit accuracy, which is sufficient for practical density estimation, but possibly not for theoretical simulation studies.
Returns
A single number giving the bandwidth
Details
These are loose wrappers around the corresponding bw.-prefixed functions in stats. See, for example, bw.SJ().
bandwidth_dpi(), which is the default bandwidth estimator in ggdist, is the Sheather-Jones direct plug-in estimator, i.e. bw.SJ(..., method = "dpi").