[R] Shafer's MIX: Query on code

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003 Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:

> Thanks to Fernando Tusell and especially to Brian Ripley for
> their work on 'mix', leading to an apparently good package
> mow available on CRAN.
> 
> Going through the R code for the function prelim.mix, I am
> wondering why the following method of calculation is used
> at one point:
> 
>   umd <- as.integer(round(exp(cumsum(log(d)))))
> 
> (d is a vector containing, in effect, the numbers of levels of
> the factors in col1, col2, ... of the categorical variables.
> Therefore umd is a vector containing the numbers of possible
> combinations of factor levels in col1, col1&col2, ... )
> 
> But why not do it as
> 
>   umd <- as.integer(cumprod(d))
> 
> ?? [It can't be that this number could go out or range, since
> that would be equally true of exp(cumsum(log(d)))) ]

I expect the author didn't know about cumprod.  It isn't in the Blue Book, 
which even does a similar calculation this way (on page 361).

There's a lot of other code that is not idiomatic S in mix.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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