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

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "MM" == Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
>>>>>     on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 16:04:37 +0200 writes:

>>>>> "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


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

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

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

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

I now see that you *did* mention the fact that you
see *different* results when you *RE*run the same code
on this data.
The subject (" ...yleft and yright ignored") is misleading in
any case.  These are not at all ignored...,
but indeed (as Duncan Murdoch has noted on the bug website),
there *is* a bug,
so you are principally right in reporting -- thank you!
....
and I could also confirm that -- as you mentioned in your first
post -- this bug does not appear when using R 2.8.1 (at least on
my platform).

Martin