[R] How to ignore data

Peter Ehlers ehlers at ucalgary.ca
Mon Dec 13 21:29:00 CET 2010


On 2010-12-13 11:36, Steve Sidney wrote:
> Oh dear oh dear!!! another arrogant statistician/scientist
>
> One asks for help and instead one gets an ear full!!!
>
> So much for the much vaunted helpful R community.
>
> But thanks anyway, I guess you were trying........
>
> Steve

Ouch!!
I didn't offer advice earlier because (a) I felt
that Ben had adequately shown you how to do what
you felt compelled to do and (b) Bert had more than
adequately conveyed the appropriate warnings.
But let me add two comments now:

1. You said that you wanted eliminate 1s because
the log of 1 is zero. That implies, at least to me,
that you might also be inclined to eliminate 0s when
you want to calculate the mean of 4, 5, 0, 9, 0, 2.
But perhaps you were just incomplete in your problem
description. Still, we do see a lot of statistical
abuse on this list.

2. As is so frequent with requests for help, the
asked-for (in the posting guide) reproducible example
was missing. That might easily have modified at least
some of the advice (as indicated by Barry).

Peter Ehlers



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