R help - Jan 1999 - NAs spoil lowess smoothing

Can anyone explain to me what this error message means, why I'm getting it,
and
how to fix it?

 lines(lowess(xdat, ydat, f=.5), col=3)
Error: NAs in foreign function call (arg 1)
______________________________________________________________________
Stuart Luppescu         -=-=-  University of Chicago
ºÍʸ ¤ÈÃÒÆàÈþ¤ÎÉã(EUC)  -=-=-  s-luppescu at uchicago.edu
http://www.consortium-chicago.org/people/sl/sl.html
ICQ #21172047  AIM: psycho7070
The program isn't debugged until the last user is
dead.
>> Sent on 28-Jan-99 at 11:26:00 with xfmail
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On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Stuart Luppescu wrote:
> Can anyone explain to me what this error message means, why I'm getting
it, and
> how to fix it?
> 
>  lines(lowess(xdat, ydat, f=.5), col=3)
> Error: NAs in foreign function call (arg 1)

It means that in a call to .C or .Fortran there are missing values in the 
first argument. The call to .C is inside lowess(), and its first argument
is the x data. So you're getting it because there are NAs in xdat.

You can fix it by removing the NAs, eg
	good<-!(is.na(xdat) | is.na(ydat))
	lines(lowess(xdat[good],ydat[good],f=.5),col=3)

Refusing to handle NAs is the usual default behaviour of functions. Some
functions have na.action= arguments to control this, but lowess doesn't.


Thomas Lumley
Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
University of Washington, Seattle


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