[R] Reading Data

[Rahul-A.Agarwal at ubs.com]

Hi,
I have a data in which the first row is in date format and the first
column is in text format and rest all the entries are numeric. Whenever
I am trying to read the data using read.table, the whole of my data is
converted in to the text format.

Please suggest what shall I do because using the numeric data which are
prices I need to calculate the return but if these prices are not
numeric then calculating return will be a problem

regards

Rahul Agarwal 
Analyst 
Equities Quantitative Research 
UBS_ISC, Hyderabad 
On Net: 19 533 6363 




-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Maechler [mailto:maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch] 
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 5:47 PM
To: Agarwal, Rahul-A
Cc: R-SIG-robust at r-project.org; r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] Oja median

>>>>>   <Rahul-A.Agarwal at ubs.com>
>>>>>     on Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:20:56 -0400 writes:

    > Hi,
 
    > Can we get the code for calculating Oja median for
    > multivariate data

Excuse me, but must you really?

The Oja median has (finite) breakdown point 2/n, i.e., is not robust in
any reasonable sense, and is quite expensive to compute, etc etc.

Rather use a better robust method,
typically (start with)  cov.rob() from the recommended (hence part of
every correct R installation) MASS package.

There are (somewhat) better methods available for robust
"location+scatter" [aka "(mu , Sigma)"] from packages 'rrcov',
'robustbase' and/or 'robust', e.g., robustbase::covMcd

If you need to know more, please divert to the SIG (special interest
group) mailling list  R-SIG-robust to which I CC this.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich