On 08/07/2008 5:01 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
On 8/07/2008, at 7:38 PM, Fiona Johnson wrote:

Hi

I have just upgraded from R2.6.0 to R2.7.1 (running on Windows) and a part of my code that previously ran ok now gives an error. The following is a
simple example to demonstrate my problem.

a <- array(c(1,2,3,4,5,6,rep(NA,6)),dim=c(6,2))
apply(a,2,sd,na.rm=T)
In R2.6.0 this gives (which is what I would like)

 [1] 1.870829       NA

In R2.7.1 it gives the following error

"Error in var(x, na.rm = na.rm) : no complete element pairs"

As my columns are always either all NA or all numbers, I could get around it by replacing the NA's with 0's but if someone could shed some light on why the behaviour has changed in the new version or a better work around it
would be much appreciated. I want to keep the columns of NA's because
ultimately I am plotting the results with contour and the NA's refer to grid
cells not on land where I don't want to have contours.

I just scanned through the release announcements (from Peter Dalgaard) about new versions of R (R home page --> What's new? --> Archive of important announcements) and found nothing about new behaviour for sd/var/cov. So I cannot contribute to enlightenment about ``why''.

This is the relevant but not so obvious NEWS entry:

    o   co[rv](use = "complete.obs") now always gives an error if there
        are no complete cases: they used to give NA if
        method = "pearson" but an error for the other two methods.  (Note
        that this is pretty arbitrary, but zero-length vectors always
        give an error so it is at least consistent.)

        cor(use="pair") used to give diagonal 1 even if the variable
        was completely missing for the rank methods but NA for the
        Pearson method: it now gives NA in all cases.

(sd calls var, which calls cov internally.)

Duncan Murdoch


>
The following function might provide
a suitable
workaround:

my.sd <- function (x, na.rm = FALSE)
{
     if (is.matrix(x))
         apply(x, 2, my.sd, na.rm = na.rm)
     else if (is.vector(x)) {
         if(na.rm) x <- x[!is.na(x)]
         if(length(x) == 0) return(NA)
         sqrt(var(x, na.rm = na.rm))
     }
     else if (is.data.frame(x))
         sapply(x, my.sd, na.rm = na.rm)
     else {
         x <- as.vector(x)
         my.sd(x,na.rm=na.rm)
     }
}

It seems to work on your toy example at least. Note that my.sd (numeric(0)) returns NA,
but my.sd(NULL) throws an error.

        cheers,

                Rolf Turner


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