[R] Why isn't R recognising integers as numbers?

[Ted Byers]

Thanks Marc,

That was it. 

For the last 30 years, I'd write my own code, in FORTRAN, C++, or even Java,
to do whatever statistical analysis I needed.  When at the office, sometimes
I could use SAS, but that hasn't been an option for me in years.

This is the first time I have had to load real data into R (instead of
generating random data to use while playing with some of the stats
functions, or manually typing dummy data).

I take it, then, that the result of loading data is a data frame, and not
just a matrix or array.  Using something like "refdata18[, 1]" feels rather
alien, but I'm sure I'll quickly get used to it.  I'd seen it before in the
R docs, but it didn't register that I had to use it to get the functions of
most interest to me to recognise my data as a vector of numbers, given I'd
provided only a vector of integers as input.

Thanks

Ted


Marc Schwartz wrote:
> 
> on 09/21/2008 08:01 PM Ted Byers wrote:
>> I have a number of files containing anywhere from a few dozen to a few
>> thousand integers, one per record.
>> 
>> The statement "refdata18 =
>> read.csv("K:\\MerchantData\\RiskModel\\Capture.Week.18.csv", header =
>> TRUE,na.strings="")" works fine, and if I type refdata18, I get the
>> integers
>> displayed, one value per record (along with a record number).  However,
>> when
>> I try " fitdistr(refdata18,"negative binomial")", or
>> hist.scott(refdata18,
>> prob = TRUE), I get an error:
>> 
>> Error in fitdistr(refdata18, "negative binomial") : 
>>   'x' must be a non-empty numeric vector
>> Or
>> Error in hist.default(x, nclass.scott(x), prob = prob, xlab = xlab, ...)
>> : 
>>   'x' must be numeric
>> 
>> How can it not recognise integers as numbers?
>> 
>> Thanks
>> 
>> Ted
> 
> 'refdata18' is a data frame and the two functions are expecting a
> numeric vector.
> 
> If you use:
> 
>   fitdistr(refdata18[, 1], "negative binomial")
> 
> or
> 
>   hist(refdata18[, 1])
> 
> you should get a suitable result, presuming that the first column in the
> data frame is a numeric vector.
> 
> Use:
> 
>   str(refdata18)
> 
> to get a sense for the structure of the data frame, including the column
> names, which you could then use, instead of the above index based syntax.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Marc Schwartz
> 
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