[R] approxfun-problems (yleft and yright ignored)

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "SW" == Samuel Wuest <wuests at tcd.ie>
>>>>>     on Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:34:26 +0100 writes:

    SW> Hi Greg,
    SW> thanks for the suggestion:

    SW> I have attached some small dataset that can be used to reproduce the
    SW> odd behavior of the approxfun-function.

    SW> If it gets stripped off my email, it can also be downloaded at:
    SW> http://bioinf.gen.tcd.ie/approx.data.Rdata

    SW> Strangely, the problem seems specific to the data structure in my
    SW> expression set, when I use simulated data, everything worked fine.

    SW> Here is some code that I run and resulted in the strange output that I
    SW> have described in my initial post:

    >> ### load the data: a list called approx.data
    >> load(file="approx.data.Rdata")
    >> ### contains the slots "x", "y", "input"
    >> names(approx.data)
    SW> [1] "x"     "y"     "input"
    >> ### with y ranging between 0 and 1
    >> range(approx.data$y)
    SW> [1] 0 1
    >> ### compare ranges of x and input-x values (the latter is a small subset of 500 data points):
    >> range(approx.data$x)
    SW> [1] 3.098444 7.268812
    >> range(approx.data$input)
    SW> [1]  3.329408 13.026700
    >> 
    >> 
    >> ### generate the interpolation function (warning message benign)
    >> interp <- approxfun(approx.data$x, approx.data$y, yleft=1, yright=0, rule=2)
    SW> Warning message:
    SW> In approxfun(approx.data$x, approx.data$y, yleft = 1, yright = 0,  :
    SW> collapsing to unique 'x' values
    >> 
    >> ### apply to input-values
    >> y.out <- sapply(approx.data$input, interp)
    >> 
    >> ### still I find output values >1, even though yleft=1:
    >> range(y.out)
    SW> [1] 0.000000 7.207233


I get completely different (and correct) results,
by the way the *same* you have in the bug report you've
submitted 
(https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=14377)
and which does *not* show any bug:

> range(y.out)
[1] 0.0000000 0.9816907

Of course, I do believe that you've seen the above problems,
-- on 64-bit Mac ? as you report in sessionInfo() ? --
but I cannot reproduce them.

And also, you seem yourself to be able to get different results
for the same data... what are the circumstances?

Regards,
Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich