[R] problem with predict()

[Liaw, Andy]

> From: Thomas Lumley [mailto:tlumley at u.washington.edu]
> Sent: Friday, June 28, 2002 2:17 PM
> 
> On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Liaw, Andy wrote:
> 
> > As Prof. Ripley guessed, the X data is less than full rank. 
>  I'm surprised
> > that lm didn't issue warning.  summary() does say:
> >
> > Coefficients: (17 not defined because of singularities)
> >
> > I'm also surprised that with such a fitted object, 
> predict(model) works, but
> > not predict(model, data), where data is the original data 
> used to fit the
> > model.  This does not seem to be user-friendly...
> 
> There's something to be said for more warnings, but I think 
> what predict
> does is reasonable.
> 
> If you have fitted a model to rank-deficient data then you 
> can predict on
> data with the same rank deficiency.  In particular, you can 
> predict on the
> original data, as predict(model) does.  However, you can't 
> predict on new
> data unless they have the same rank-deficiencies, and since this is
> something that can't be tested stably it make sense to refuse 
> to predict
> on new data.

But in that case shouldn't there be a more informative error message?  If
that's the desired behavior, I'd check for rank deficiency in the fitted
object, and issue an error if newdata is supplied, rather than waiting for
something to break downstream.

Just my $0.02...

Andy

> 
> 	-thomas
> >

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