[R] Bug? in summary( ) function base package

[Mike Prager]

"Richard Saba" <sabaric at auburn.edu> wrote:

> There seems to be an error in the summary() function when applied to "ts"
> class objects. The results of a call to summary( ), on the R  "ts" data set
> USAccDeaths , reports the wrong value for Max. The value reported by the
> summary function is 11320. The max( ) function returns the correct value
> 11317, the July 1993 value. Coercing the data to a data.frame and calling
> summary returns the correct max value. A search of R -help found a post in
> 2007 that mentioned a problem but attributed it to rounding errors. But this
> is too large a difference to account for a simple rounding error. 
> 
> Has anyone else encountered the problem? Is there a workaround?

A documented feature of summary() is that it rounds values. In
doing so, it may print meaningless digits and thus give the
appearance of more precision than is really represented.

-- 
Mike Prager, NOAA, Beaufort, NC
* Opinions expressed are personal and not represented otherwise.
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