On 12/9/21 10:03 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> Matthias Gondan
>>>>>> on Wed, 8 Dec 2021 19:37:09 +0100 writes:
>
> > Dear R developers,
> > I have seen that plogis silently ignores vector elements of lower.tail,
>
> and also of 'log'.
> This is indeed the case for all d*, p*, q* functions.
>
> Yes, this has been on purpose and therefore documented, in the
> case of plogis, e.g. in the 'Value' section of ?plogis :
>
> The length of the result is determined by ‘n’ for ‘rlogis’, and is
> the maximum of the lengths of the numerical arguments for the
> other functions.
>
> (note: *numerical* arguments: the logical ones are not recycled)
>
> The numerical arguments other than ‘n’ are recycled to the length
> of the result. Only the first elements of the logical arguments
> are used.
>
> (above, we even explicitly mention the logical arguments ..)
>
>
> Recycling happens for the first argument (x,p,q) of these
> functions and for "parameters" of the distribution, but not for
> lower.tail, log.p (or 'log').
>
>
> >> plogis(q=0.5, location=1, lower.tail=TRUE)
> > [1] 0.3775407
> >> plogis(q=0.5, location=1, lower.tail=FALSE)
> > [1] 0.6224593
> >> plogis(q=c(0.5, 0.5), location=1, lower.tail=c(TRUE, FALSE))
> > [1] 0.3775407 0.3775407
>
> > For those familiar with psychological measurement: A use case of the above function is the so-called Rasch model, where the probability that a person with some specific ability (q) makes a correct (lower.tail=TRUE) or wrong response (lower.tail=FALSE) to an item with a specific difficulty (location). A vectorized version of plogis would enable to determine the likelihood of an entire response vector in a single call. My current workaround is an intermediate call to „Vectorize“.
>
> > I am wondering if the logical argument of lower.tail can be vectorized (?). I see that this may be a substantial change in many places (basically, all p and q functions of probability distributions), but in my understanding, it would not break existing code which assumes lower.tail to be a single element. If that’s not
> > possible/feasible, I suggest to issue a warning if a vector of length > 1 is given in lower.tail. I am aware that the documentation clearly states that lower.tail is a single boolean.
>
> aah ok, here you say you know that the current behavior is documented.
>
> > Thank you for your consideration.
>
>
> As you mention, changing this would be quite a large endeavor.
> I had thought about doing that many years ago, not remembering
> details, but seeing that in almost all situations you really
> only need one of the two tails (for Gaussian- or t- based confidence
> intervals you also only need one, for symmetry reason).
>
> Allowing the recycling there would make the intermediate C code
> (which does the recycling) larger and probably slightly
> slower because of conceptually two more for loops which would in
> 99.9% only have one case ..
>
> I'd have found that ugly to add. ... ...
> ... but of course, if you can prove that the code bloat would not be large
> and not deteriorate speed in a measurable way and if you'd find
> someone to produce a comprehensive and tested patch ...
>
> Martin
>
>
> > With best wishes,
> > Matthias
>
>
>
> > [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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>
I agree with everything said above, but think that adding a warning
when length(lower.tail) > 1 (rather than silently ignoring) might be
helpful ... ??
As for the vectorization, it seems almost trivial to do at the user
level when needed (albeit it's probably a little bit inefficient):
pv <- Vectorize(plogis, c("q", "location", "scale", "lower.tail"))
pv(q=c(0.5, 0.5), location=1, lower.tail=c(TRUE, FALSE))
[1] 0.3775407 0.6224593