Ben,

It helps us help you if you provide a simple example with code that anyone
can run.  When I created a simplified version of you situation, the NAs in
the response variable yielded NAs in the residuals just as the help for
na.exclude indicates.

?na.exclude

Can you replicate the problem (and the error message) you are having using
reproducible code?

Jean


# number of observations
n1 <- 10
# number of response variables
n2 <- 5
# randomly generate the independent variable
x <- rnorm(n1)
# create a matrix to store the residuals in
keep <- matrix(NA, nrow=n1, ncol=n2)

# fit a linear model for each response variable
for(i in 1:n2) {
 # randomly generate the response
y <- rnorm(n1)
# randomly put in some missing values
 y[sample(n1, 2)] <- NA
# fit the data
fit <- lm(y ~ x, na.action=na.exclude)
 # keep the residuals
keep[, i] <- resid(fit)
}
# look at the resulting matrix of residuals
keep

            [,1]        [,2]       [,3]        [,4]       [,5]
 [1,] -1.1435507  0.29915778 -0.4593465 -0.61984029  0.8691960
 [2,]  1.3410409  0.51701634         NA  0.65691397         NA
 [3,]  1.0896517          NA  0.2239847 -0.63233644 -1.0831747
 [4,]         NA -1.80344171 -1.2984848 -0.26543679  0.4486482
 [5,] -2.0836253  1.05313477         NA -0.02031142 -0.1059559
 [6,]  1.4498942  0.61520388 -0.2172015 -0.90647457  0.4935462
 [7,] -0.6265764 -0.08396366  0.5153020          NA -0.2501000
 [8,]         NA          NA  0.9337658 -0.10289794         NA
 [9,] -0.4217575 -0.42633169  0.1070141  1.89038347 -0.6588342
[10,]  0.3949231 -0.17077571  0.1949662          NA  0.2866744



On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 8:19 AM, Ben Ammar <Ben-Ammar@gmx.de> wrote:

>
>    Dear all
>
>    I've  got  the following problem, I want to extract the residuals from
>    regression loops. The problem here is that some columns include NA's at
> the
>    beginning and end (i.e. each time series of stocks starts at different
>    points  in  time and ends at different points in time). When I want to
>    transfer these residuals into a matrix to determine the residual
> matrix, I
>    get the error message ("number of items to replace is not a multiple of
>    replacement length"). I tried it with na.action=na.exclude but that
> doesn't
>    work because that command doesn't actually change the vector length.
> With a
>    loop I came this far:
>    Number of stocks is 50 and maximum time period is 258 months:
>
>    for (i in 1:50) {CAPM.res[,i] <- residuals(lm(timeseries[,i]~exc.mkt),
>    na.action=na.exclude)}
>
>    as I said it doesn't work because of the different column length in the
>    matrix "timeseries". So right now I'm doing kind of manually which works
>    perfectly but is quite intensive and looks like that:
>    test.1 <- lm(timeseries[,1]~exc.mkt, na.action=na.exclude)
>    residual.test.1 <- residuals(test.1)
>    CAPM.res[,1] <- residual.Life.1
>
>    test.2 <- lm(timeseries[,2]~exc.mkt, na.action=na.exclude)
>    residual.test.2 <- residuals(test.2)
>    CAPM.res[,2] <- residual.test.2
>
>    ....and so on for the remaining 49 stocks. When I look at that I
> obviously
>    see that this must be done with a loop but in the end I can't put in the
>    matrix because of the different lengths. So far I got this:
>    test<-matrix(0,50,258)
>    residual.test<-matrix(0,50,258)
>    for (i in 1:50) {lm(timeseries[,i]~exc.mkt, na.action=na.exclude)
>                    {residual.test[i] <- residuals(test[i])
>                    {CAPM.res[,i] <- residual.test[i]
>    }}}
>
>    but here I get the error message: "Error: $ operator is invalid for
> atomic
>    vectors"
>    and I don't think "test"  and "residual.test" is defined correctly
> because I
>    don't know where to look for the residuals.
>
>    Does anyone have an idea how to extract the residuals and put them in a
>    258x50 matrix?
>    Any help would be very much appreciated!
>
>    Cheers,
>    Ben
> ______________________________________________
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> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

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