R help - Jul 1998 - R-beta: sum of squares and NAs

This surprised me.  Is it the way it is supposed to be?
> x<-c(1,2,3,4,5)
> y<-c(1.2,1.3,1.4,1.5,NA)
> x-y
[1] -0.2  0.7  1.6  2.5   NA
> (x-y)^2
[1] 0.04 0.49 2.56 6.25  NaN
>>>so NA^2 = NaN? Why not still NA?
> sum((x-y)^2)
[1] NaN
>>>yes that is reasonable
So if you ever have a data set with missing observations (NAs), you can't
do any nlm() least squares fitting? That doesn't seem right.

Thanks for any help.

Bill Simpson

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Bill Simpson <wsimpson at uwinnipeg.ca> writes:
> 
> This surprised me.  Is it the way it is supposed to be?
> > x<-c(1,2,3,4,5)
> > y<-c(1.2,1.3,1.4,1.5,NA)
> > x-y
> [1] -0.2  0.7  1.6  2.5   NA
> > (x-y)^2
> [1] 0.04 0.49 2.56 6.25  NaN
> >>>so NA^2 = NaN? Why not still NA?
> 
> > sum((x-y)^2)
> [1] NaN
> >>>yes that is reasonable
> 
> So if you ever have a data set with missing observations (NAs), you
can't
> do any nlm() least squares fitting? That doesn't seem right.
Bug, disappeared in current intermediate patch version.


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
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