The reason is that you asked for more terms than can exist.
You seem unaware that 2.6.2 is obsolete, and that there are changes
in R-patched, with the following NEWS item:
o poly() has additional checks against user error (as in PR#11243).
and that the help page now says
degree: the degree of the polynomial. Must be less than the number
of unique points.
As the FAQ says, please don't make further reports on items that have
already been addressed (as clearly marked in the bug repository).
On Fri, 16 May 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I don't understand why this is a bug in usage. Is it because the 2nd
argument is not named? I get the same behavior if I do name it:
=====
[R version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08), Windows XP Pro]
R> x = rep(1:4,3)
R> y = (1:12)^1.5
R> lm(y ~ poly(x, degree=10))
Call:
lm(formula = y ~ poly(x, degree = 10))
Coefficients:
(Intercept) poly(x, degree = 10)1 poly(x, degree = 10)2
18.39370 14.21385 0.58588
poly(x, degree = 10)3 poly(x, degree = 10)4 poly(x, degree = 10)5
-0.01770 3.34767 -11.46388
poly(x, degree = 10)6 poly(x, degree = 10)7 poly(x, degree = 10)8
0.51178 0.44296 12.47199
poly(x, degree = 10)9 poly(x, degree = 10)10
-28.38972 18.47439
=====
Is there a case where we *would* want a 10th degree polynomial fitted to
only 4 distinct x values? A simple modification [changing 'length(x)'
to 'length(unique(x))' in 2 places] seems to fix this:
=====
R> mypoly
...
if (raw) {
if (degree >= length(unique(x)))
stop("'degree' must be less than number of points")
...
if (is.null(coefs)) {
if (degree >= length(unique(x)))
stop("'degree' must be less than number of points")
...
R> lm(y ~ mypoly(x, degree=10))
Error in mypoly(x, degree = 10) :
'degree' must be less than number of points
=====
Russ
--
Russell V. Lenth, Professor
Department of Statistics
& Actuarial Science (319)335-0814 FAX (319)335-3017
The University of Iowa [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Iowa City, IA 52242 USA http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~rlenth/
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--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
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