[R] fitdistr, mle's and gamma distribution

[Lourens Olivier Walters]

Dear R Users, 

I am trying to obtain a best-fit analytic distribution for a dataset
with 11535459 entries. The data range in value from 1 to 300000000. I
use: fitdistr(data, "gamma") to obtain mle's for the parameters.
 
I get the following error:

Error in optim(start, mylogfn, x = x, hessian = TRUE, ...) :
        non-finite finite-difference value [1]

And the following warnings:

NaNs produced in: dgamma(x, shape, scale, log)

I have the same problem with the exponential distribution, but the
lognormal and weibull distributions don't have this problem. 

I suspect the problem has to do with:

"It means that in computing derivatives by finite differencing, one 
of the values is NA, +Inf or -Inf. Put some print values in 
your objective function and find out why it is giving a non-finite
value." - quote by Prof Ripley from r-help

as from the warnings it is clear that some of the values obtained during
maximum likelihood computations are NaN. I cannot however print values
of the objective function, as in my case it is dgamma which is called by
fitdistr, over which I don't have control.  

Can anyone please point me in the right direction?

Lourens

-- 
Lourens Olivier Walters <lwalters at cs.uct.ac.za>
Computer Science Masters Student
University of Cape Town
South Africa
http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~lwalters/