I was wondering if it would make sense to change the default behavior of the
following:
summary(15555L)
## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
## 15560 15560 15560 15560 15560 15560
summary.default on numeric values rounds values (not just presentation) to
getOption("digits")-3L (or four) digits by default, making those values
surprising and less suitable for further calculation. Summary on matrix and
data.frame do not do so.
It seems it would be nice to have x=15555L; summary(x)[['Min.']] == min(x)
evaluate to TRUE. I know one can alter behavior by changing the global
“digits” option, but I don’t know what other impacts that might have. Ideally
I would think summary.default would not round its values at all, but use digits
to control presentation (by overriding print and such). Even in presentation
the rounding without switching to scientific notation (such as 1.556e+4) is a
bit surprising (I understand rounding and scientific notation are two different
presentation issues, but new users are very confused that something that
appears to be an integer has been rounded).
Example:
summary(data.frame(x=15555))
## x
## Min. :15555
## 1st Qu.:15555
## Median :15555
## Mean :15555
## 3rd Qu.:15555
## Max. :15555
summary(15555)
## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
## 15560 15560 15560 15560 15560 15560
I have a (bit whiny) polemic trying to explain the pain point here
http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/08/my-criticism-of-r-numeric-summary/
<http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/08/my-criticism-of-r-numeric-summary/> (I
am not trying to be rude, more I am trying to emphasize why this can be
confusing to new users).
---------------
John Mount
http://www.win-vector.com/ <http://www.win-vector.com/>
Our book: Practical Data Science with R http://www.manning.com/zumel/
<http://www.manning.com/zumel/>
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
