[R] making spearman correlation cor() call fail with log(0) as input

[Timur Shtatland]

You are right, Inf and -Inf are not considered errors in R, they are
accepted as input to Spearman's cor(), and so I will have to check the
input myself for such condition.
Thank you for pointing this out!

Timur

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Greg Snow <Greg.Snow at imail.org> wrote:
> Your code shows no errors only correct responses.
>
> If you want an error when R is generating correct results, you will need to check for the conditions yourself.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Timur Shtatland" <tshtatland at gmail.com>
> To: "r-help at r-project.org" <r-help at r-project.org>
> Sent: 9/10/08 3:51 PM
> Subject: [R] making spearman correlation cor() call fail with log(0) as input
>
>
> Hi,
>
> How can I make the cor(x, y, method="spearman") call to produce an
> error when the input to it (x, y) produces an error? Here is a simple
> example:
>
>> a <- c(0, 1, 2)
>> b <- c(100, 2, 4)
>
> ## error:
>> log(a)
> [1]      -Inf 0.0000000 0.6931472
>
> ## error, as expected:
>> cor(log(a), log(b), method="pearson")
> [1] NaN
>
> ## not an error any more (not expected):
>> cor(log(a), log(b), method="spearman")
> [1] -0.5
>> cor(log(a), log(b), method="spearman", use="all.obs")
> [1] -0.5
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.6.1 (2007-11-26)
> i686-pc-linux-gnu
>
> locale:
> LC_CTYPE=en_US;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_US;LC_COLLATE=en_US;LC_MONETARY=en_US;LC_MESSAGES=en_US;LC_PAPER=en_US;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>>
>
> Thank you for your help.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Timur Shtatland
>
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