[R] summary gives inaccurate data

[Thomas Lumley]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Christoph M. Friedrich wrote:

> Hi,
> using R64.1 the summary function for simple statistics of a vector gives
> inaccurate
> results for the maximum. 
> Example:
> summary(c(123456,1,2,3))
> 
> gives :
> 
>      Min.   1st Qu.    Median      Mean   3rd Qu.      Max. 
>      1.00      1.75      2.50  30870.00  30870.00 123500.00 
> 
> The Max value ist wrong in a mathematical sense. I've tried with S-Plus,
> it gives the same result,
> but this seems to be inaccurate. 
> 
> Any suggestions for this problem

This is due to rounding to 4 significant figures.  You can do eg
R> summary(c(123456,1,2,3),digits=8)
    Min.   1st Qu.    Median      Mean   3rd Qu.      Max. 
     1.00      1.75      2.50  30865.50  30866.25 123456.00 

to get more accuracy


Thomas Lumley
Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
University of Washington, Seattle

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._