>>>>> "BB" == Ben Bolker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>>>> on Thu, 2 Oct 2008 13:07:02 +0000 (UTC) writes:
BB> <klaus.steenberg.larsen <at> risoe.dk> writes:
>>
>> Dear R-Help,
>>
>> I have used R2.6.0 until I recently installed also R2.7.2 (see details
below)
>>
>> In R 2.6.0, the following script using the function 'var' (cor(stats)):
>>
>> x.test <- c(NA, NA, NA, NA)
>>
>> var(x.test, na.rm=T)
>>
>> gives the output:
>>
>> NA
>>
>> In R2.7.2 the output of the same script generates an error message and
stops R:
>>
>> 'Error in var(x.test, na.rm = T) : no complete element pairs'
>>
>> R2.7.2 can handle it if there is just one non-NA value in the list but
not if
BB> they are all NA.
>>
>> I prefer the output of 2.6.0. Is this a bug in 2.7.2 or is it a
deliberate
BB> change compare to previous versions?
>> Or is there a way to make R2.7.2 give NA as output?
>>
>> Thank you for any helo/comments!
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Klaus
BB> This is a deliberate change, but the behavior will
BB> (more or less) revert in version 2.8.0.
BB> From the NEWS file for 2.7 (in bug fixes):
BB> o co[rv](use = "complete.obs") now always gives an error if there
BB> are no complete cases: they used to give NA if
BB> method = "pearson" but an error for the other two methods.
BB> (Note that this is pretty arbitrary, but zero-length vectors
BB> always give an error so it is at least consistent.)
BB> Since sd(na.rm=TRUE) and var(na.rm=TRUE) both call cov(use =
BB> "complete.obs"), this applies also to them.
BB> cor(use="pair") used to give diagonal 1 even if the variable
BB> was completely missing for the rank methods but NA for the
BB> Pearson method: it now gives NA in all cases.
BB> cor(use="pair") for the rank methods gave a matrix result with
BB> dimensions > 0 even if one of the inputs had 0 columns.
BB> From the NEWS file for the development version
BB> o var(),cov(),cor() etc now by default (when 'use' is not specified)
BB> return NA in many cases where they signalled an error before.
BB> I don't know of a really easy way to make the behavior revert, perhaps
BB> the easiest workaround is to make a 'my.var' function that first
BB> tests if(all(is.na(x))) -- if you want to live really dangerously
BB> you could even call it 'var' and have it mask the built-in function,
BB> but that's probably a bad idea.
Thank you, Ben.
Yes masking var() is a bad idea;
a much better (and much less error-prone) idea would be to install
R 2.8.0 alpha even now.
It will become 'beta' early next week.
We are asking the R community to please install and use
pre-release versions of R (if you can / are allowed to)
at least from beta onwards, and report problems you see early on
*before* the final release.
That's one thing you can give back to the R developers who
provide R freely to you.
Best regards,
Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich and R Core Team
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