Thanks; definitely a bug. I've submitted it to the bug tracker at
https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17831
Best,
luke
On Mon, 15 Jun 2020, Raimundo Neto wrote:
Dear R developers,
I've run into a weird behavior of the numericDeriv function (from the stats
package) which I also posted on StackOverflow (question has same title as
this email, except for the version of R).
Running the code bellow we can see that the numericDeriv function gives an
error as the derivative of x^a wrt a is x^a * log(x) and log is not defined
for negative numbers. However, seems like the function changes the value of
env1$a from 3 to 3.000000044703483581543. If x is a vector of positive
values numericDeriv function completes the task without errors and env1$a
remains unchanged as expected.
This happened to me running R 4.0.1 on Ubuntu 20.04 and also to another
StackOverflow user using running the same version of R on Windows 10. I
wonder, is this an intended behavior of the function or really a bug?
options(digits=22)
env1 = new.env()
env1$x = rnorm(10)
env1$a = 3
eval(quote(x^a), env1)
numericDeriv(quote(x^a), "a", env1)
eval(quote(x^a), env1)
env1$a
Thank you!
Raimundo Neto
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Luke Tierney
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017
Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall email: [email protected]
Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
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