Sorry, I did not get it at first. Now I see your problem. I accidentally used pearson. So it does not work for kendall's tau or spearman's rho. The reason why it does not work is because there is one column full of NAs in the second matrix. It works if you have more than one valid value to compare to in each of the matrix columns:
m=matrix(c(1,2,3,3,4,5),nrow=3,ncol=2) d=matrix(c(2,3,4,9,5,NA),nrow=3,ncol=2) cor(d,m,method="k",use="pairwise.complete.obs") I don't know if that helps, but it is an explanation. Why pearson works and spearman and kendall don't, I don't know. Cheers, Daniel ------------------------- cuncta stricte discussurus ------------------------- -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von Hilmar Berger Gesendet: Wednesday, January 02, 2008 12:39 PM An: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Betreff: [R] strange behavior of cor() with pairwise.complete.obs Hi all, I'm not quite sure if this is a feature or a bug or if I just fail to understand the documentation: If I use cor() with pairwise.complete.obs and method=pearson, the result is a scalar: ->cor(c(1,2,3),c(3,4,6),use="pairwise.complete.obs",method="pearson") [1] 0.9819805 The documentation says that " '"pairwise.complete.obs"' only works with the '"pearson"' method for 'cov' and 'var'." Thus, I guess that cor() should work for pairwise.complete.obs and method = "kendall", or am I misinterpreting that statement ? -> c(1,2,3),c(3,4,6),use="pairwise.complete.obs",method="kendall") [,1] [1,] 1 Now the result is a matrix with dimensions (1,1) - strange enough. Note that when I use "all.obs" or "complete.obs" I get a scalar for method kendall, too. It gets worse if one tries to calculate the correlation between the columns of two matrices (i.e. cor(x,y) with x and y being a matrix). Then -> c=matrix(c(1,2,3,3,4,5),nrow=3,ncol=2) -> d=matrix(c(2,3,4,NA,NA,NA),nrow=3,ncol=2) -> cor(c,d,use="pairwise.complete.obs",method="pearson") [,1] [,2] [1,] 1 NA [2,] 1 NA -> cor(c,d,use="pairwise.complete.obs",method="kendall") Error: 'x' is empty (*translated from german error message*) The behavior is reproducible in R 2.4.1 and 2.6.1 (WinXP). I noticed that in 2.7.0 something was fixed in cor() related to "complete.obs" handling - would that fix my problems ? Any suggestions ? Thanks, Hilmar ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.
