[R] Stata/Rstudio evil attributes

[Viechtbauer, Wolfgang (SP)]

Dear Roger,

The problem is this. qss() looks like this:

if (is.matrix(x)) {
   [...]
}
if (is.vector(x)) {
   [...]
}
qss

Now let's check these if() statements:
is.vector(B$x) # TRUE
is.vector(D$x) # FALSE
is.matrix(B$x) # FALSE
is.matrix(D$x) # FALSE

is.vector(D$x) being FALSE may be surprising, but see ?is.vector: "is.vector returns TRUE if x is a vector of the specified mode having no attributes other than names. It returns FALSE otherwise." And as D$x shows, this vector has additional attributes.

So, with 'D', qss() returns the qss function (c.f., qss(B$x) and qss(D$x)) which makes no sense. So, the internal logic in qss() needs to be fixed.

>In accordance with the usual R-help etiquette I first tried to contact the
>maintainer of the haven package, i.e. RStudio, which elicited the response: "since
>the error is occurring outside RStudio we’re not responsible, so try Stack
>Overflow".  This is pretty much what I would have expected from the capitalist
>running dogs they are.  Admittedly, the error is probably due to some unforeseen

This kind of bashing is really silly. Can you tell us again how much you paid for the use of the haven package?

Best,
Wolfgang

>-----Original Message-----
>From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces using r-project.org] On Behalf Of Koenker, Roger W
>Sent: Saturday, 10 April, 2021 11:26
>To: r-help
>Subject: [R] Stata/Rstudio evil attributes
>
>As shown in the reproducible example below, I used the RStudio function haven() to
>read a Stata .dta file, and then tried to do some fitting with the resulting
>data.frame.  This produced an error from my fitting function rqss() in the package
>quantreg.  After a bit of frustrated cursing, I converted the data.frame, D, to a
>matrix A, and thence back to a data.frame B, and tried again, which worked as
>expected.  The conversion removed the attributes of D.  My question is:  why were
>the attributes inhibiting the fitting?
>
>In accordance with the usual R-help etiquette I first tried to contact the
>maintainer of the haven package, i.e. RStudio, which elicited the response: "since
>the error is occurring outside RStudio we’re not responsible, so try Stack
>Overflow".  This is pretty much what I would have expected from the capitalist
>running dogs they are.  Admittedly, the error is probably due to some unforeseen
>infelicity in my rqss() coding, but it does seem odd that attributes could have
>such a drastic  effect.  I would be most grateful for any insight the R commune
>might offer.
>
>#require(haven) # for reading dta file
>#Ddta <- read_dta(“foo.dta")
>#D <- with(Ddta, data.frame(y = access_merg, x = meannets_allhh, z = meanhh))
>#save(D, file = "D.Rda")
>con <- url("http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger/research/data/D.Rda")
>load(con)
>
># If I purge the Stata attributes in D:
>A <- as.matrix(D)
>B <- as.data.frame(A)
>
># This works:
>with(D,plot(x, y, cex = .5, col = "grey"))
>taus <- 1:4/5
>require(quantreg)
>for(i in 1:length(taus)){
>    f <- rqss(y ~ qss(x, constraint = "I", lambda = 1), tau = taus[i], data = B)
>    plot(f, add = TRUE, col = i)
>}
># However, the same code with data = D, does not.  Why?