[R] Apparent problem with coxph

[lhunsicker at mchsi.com]

Good evening, folks:

I am trying to run a bootstrap on a CoxPH regression.  I have set up a 1,000 x 1,000 matrix of "cases" and am running 1,000 analyses of 1,000 cases each.  The loop keeps breaking because of an error, and I have more or less isolated the problem to a call of the coxph function with a subset of the cases.

Specifically, I am trying to regress a survival against poly(CREAT6MO,4).

I located one of the specific runs where the code was breaking and copied this to "anomaly1".  (Most of the runs work fine.  About 1 in 20 seems to fail.)

There are no missing or out of range values for TTFAIL, FFAIL, or CREAT6MO in anomaly1.

poly(anomaly1$CREAT6MO,4) runs fine, with no error.  

But  -- coxph(Surv(TTFAIL - 182, FFAIL) ~ poly(CREAT6MO,4), data = anomaly1) 

fails with the following error code.

Error in fitter(X, Y, strats, offset, init, control, weights = weights,  : 
  NA/NaN/Inf in foreign function call (arg 6)
In addition: Warning message:
In fitter(X, Y, strats, offset, init, control, weights = weights,  :
  Ran out of iterations and did not converge

traceback() gives:

traceback()
3: .C("coxmart", as.integer(n), as.integer(method == "efron"), stime, 
       sstat, newstrat, as.double(score), as.double(weights), resid = double(n))
2: fitter(X, Y, strats, offset, init, control, weights = weights, 
       method = method, row.names(m))
1: coxph(Surv(TTFAIL - 182, FFAIL) ~ poly(CREAT6MO, 4), data = anomaly1)


This problem seems to be "above my payline."  Any suggestions, anyone?

As always, many thanks in advance to any help that any of you can give me.

Larry Hunsicker