[Rd] issue with model.frame()

Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. therne@u @ending from m@yo@edu
Tue May 1 15:11:44 CEST 2018


A user sent me an example where coxph fails, and the root of the failure is a case where 
names(mf) is not equal to the term.labels attribute of the formula -- the latter has an 
extraneous newline. Here is an example that does not use the survival library.

# first create a data set with many long names
n <- 30  # number of rows for the dummy data set
vname <- vector("character", 26)
for (i in 1:26) vname[i] <- paste(rep(letters[1:i],2), collapse='')  # long variable names

tdata <- data.frame(y=1:n, matrix(runif(n*26), nrow=n))
names(tdata) <- c('y', vname)

# Use it in a formula
myform <- paste("y ~ cbind(", paste(vname, collapse=", "), ")")
mf <- model.frame(formula(myform), data=tdata)

match(attr(terms(mf), "term.labels"), names(mf))   # gives NA

----

In the user's case the function is ridge(x1, x2, ....) rather than cbind, but the effect 
is the same.
Any ideas for a work around?

Aside: the ridge() function is very simple, it was added as an example to show how a user 
can add their own penalization to coxph.  I never expected serious use of it.  For this 
particular user the best answer is to use glmnet instead.   He/she is trying to apply an 
L2 penalty to a large number of SNP * covariate interactions.

Terry T.




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