[R] why delete.response?

[Thomas Lumley]

On Fri, 23 Aug 2002, Saket Joshi wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am running R1.5.0 under unix.
>
> I recently used the function 'predict.tree' to make predictions with a
> tree object and a dataframe of numeric items. The predict.tree internally,
> calls a function 'delete.response'.
>
> When I removed this function call from the source code of predict.tree, it
> ran 10 times faster without any differences in the result obtained.
> The documentation for delete.response says that this function is used for
> deleting the response variable from the dataset. However the documentation
> for the predict.tree function says that the response variable is ignored
> during prediction.
>
> Could someone tell me why the function 'predict.tree' calls
> 'delete.response'?

In order to ignore the response.

If you remove the call to delete.response() you will not be able to
predict on a new data set that does not have the response variable
defined. Eg, following example(predict.tree)
     data(shuttle, package="MASS")
     shuttle.tr <- tree(use ~ ., shuttle, subset=1:253,
                        mindev=1e-6, minsize=2)
     shuttle.tr
     shuttle1 <- shuttle[254:256, ]  # 3 missing cases
     predict(shuttle.tr, shuttle1)

     shuttle2<-shutlle1[,-7]  #drop response variable
     ## this doesn't work in your version
     predict(shuttle.tr, shuttle2)


It's very surprising that delete.response is that slow. I haven't seen it
take more than a few hundredths of a second

	-thomas

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