[R] what does this error mean?

[Thomas W Blackwell]

Josh  -

See the example "run a simulation" in  help("try").

This won't be able to tell you the Spearman correlation
when there are fewer than two pairs of non-missing values,
but it will allow the loop to keep running.  Caution: the
return value from  try()  will be a string with the error
message, when  cor.test()  fails, so whatever variable
you accumulate the simulation results in must be able
to tolerate string values.  That suggests using a list.

-  tom blackwell  -  u michigan medical school  -  ann arbor  -

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 szhan at uoguelph.ca wrote:

> Dear R-users:
> I am runing R 1.6.2 with Windows XP. I try to calculate Pearson correlation
> and Spearman correlation of any pairwise columns of 8000 x 80 data matrix with
> missing values and randomize the matix 1000 times and calculate this two
> correlations again. The code bellow for Pearson is working fine but for
> Spearman got the error bellow for randomized data matrix and R console is stop
> working:
>
> cor (raw2[,i], raw2[,j], use="complete.obs")
> cor.test (raw2[,i], raw2[,j],  method="spearman", na.action = "na.omit")
> $estimate
>
> Error in cor.test.default(raw2[, i], raw2[, j], method = "spearman",
> na.action = "na.omit") :
>         not enough finite observations
> In addition: There were 50 or more warnings (use warnings() to see
> the first  50)
>
> What does the Error mean? How to fix it?
> Any suggestion are highly appreciated?
> Josh