[R] once more: methods on missing data
Maciej.Hoffman-Wecker@evotecoai.com
Maciej.Hoffman-Wecker at evotecoai.com
Thu Jun 7 16:41:30 CEST 2001
Thanks for replies, but i was not precise enough.
The problem is not evaluating statistics on data with NA values.
The problem is evaluation of statistics on data with length = 0.
To make the problem more clear this is what i tried:
This works fine:
tapply(as.numeric(c(NA,2)), as.factor(c("a","b")), summary)
But i need SDev, aswell, so i copied summary.default to my.summary and
changed only the line
qq <- signif(c(qq[1:3], mean(object), qq[4:5]), digits)
names(qq) <- c("Min.", "1st Qu.", "Median", "Mean", "3rd Qu.",
"Max.")
to
qq <- signif(c(qq[1:3], mean(object), qq[4:5], sd(object),
mad(object)), digits)
names(qq) <- c("Min.", "1st Qu.", "Median", "Mean", "3rd Qu.",
"Max.","SDev","MAD")
and
tapply(as.numeric(c(NA,2)), as.factor(c("a","b")), my.summary)
results in
Error in var(x, na.rm = na.rm) : `x' is empty
I think this is a frequent problem. It results from the following.
The result of the call
x <- as.numeric(c(NA,NA,NA)); STATISTIC(x[!is.na(x)])
depends on the STATISTIC.
STATISTIC RESULT
min Inf and warning message
max -Inf and warning message
mean NaN and no warning message
quantile named vector containing NAs and no warning message
sd abortion of the evaluation with an error message
The breakup is more difficult to handle.
What i did is changing the var function. I changed
.Internal(cov(x, y, na.method))
to
z <- try(.Internal(cov(x, y, na.method)))
if (inherits(z, "try-error")) return(as.numeric(NA))
else return(z)
This works fine, but a solution within cov.c would be better, i think.
I try not to change standard source code on myself, as i don't know if
this has any consequences.
Should not the statistics generally return NA and a warning message?
Hope this is not a too marginal problem.
Maciej
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