similar to: help files for load and related functions

There's a new page on the Burns Statistics website http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html that looks at spreadsheets from a quality assurance perspective. It presents R as a suitable alternative to spreadsheets. Also there are several specific problems with Excel that are highlighted, including the status of statistical functionality in Excel. Patrick Burns Burns

'assign' does not give a warning if 'x' has length greater than 1 -- it just uses the first element: assign(c('a1', 'a2'), 1:2) One way of thinking about this is that people using 'assign' get what they deserve. The other is that it is used seldom enough that adding a warning isn't going to slow things down appreciably. Patrick Burns patrick at

You may recall that there was a discussion of a technical report from the statistical consulting group at UCLA. I have a draft of a comment on that report, which you can get from http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Flotsam/uclaRcomment_draft1.pdf I'm interested in comments: corrections, additions, deletions. Patrick Burns patrick at burns-stat.com +44 (0)20 8525 0696 http://www.burns-stat.com

There is now a tutorial on bootstrapping and other resampling methods at: http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/bootstrap_resampling.html Corrections and other suggestions are welcome. The project started because a novice asked me about bootstrapping. My response was, "How dare you bug me while I'm playing with my cats, just google for it." My correspondent was not very impressed

"sum" (and perhaps other functions?) allows partial argument name matching after its three-dots argument: > sum(1:4, NA, n=78, na.rm=FALSE) [1] 10 > sum(1:4, NA, n=78, na.rm=TRUE) [1] 11 I can see there could be a discussion about whether or not this is a bug, but I think all will agree that it's a might peculiar. This is done in 2.0.1 but the same behavior is in 1.8.1.

I had an error to debug that turned out to be essentially: > NULL * matrix(1:4, 2) Error: dim<- length of dims do not match the length of object The equivalent of the NULL was a variable that was meant to be a scalar. It took me a while to track down the problem because I was focusing on looking for arrays that were different than my expectation. I think it could save substantial

"The R Inferno" is now on the Burns Statistics website at http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf Abstract: If you are using R and you think you're in hell, this is a map for you. Also, I've expanded the outline concerning R on the Burns Statistics 'Links' page. Suggestions (off-list) for additional items are encouraged. Patrick Burns patrick at

The following is at least as much out of intellectual curiosity as for practical reasons. On reviewing some code written by novices to R, I came across: crossprod(x, y)[1,1] I thought, "That isn't a very S way of saying that, I wonder what the penalty is for using 'crossprod'." To my surprise the penalty was substantially negative. Handily the client had S-PLUS as

In the help file for "fix" in the Details section: I suggest that "when" be replaced by "in which case" so that the sentence reads: The name supplied as 'x' need not exist as an R object, in which case a function with no arguments and an empty body is supplied for editing. I'm looking at: platform i386-pc-mingw32 arch i386 os

Hi Is it possible to subset an n-dimensional array by a vector of n dimensions? E.g. assume I have > x <- array(1:24, dim=2:4) > x[1,1,2] [1] 7 > dims <- c(1,1,2) I would like a function that I can supply x and dims as parameters to, and have it return 7. Also, I would like to do something like: > x[1,1,] [1] 1 7 13 19 > dims2<- c(1,1,NA) And have a function of x and

I'm not sure if the following is a bug or a feature: > jjmat <- array(1:6, c(2,3), list(c('ABC', 'DEF'), c('xyz', 'tuv', 'qrs'))) > jjdf <- as.data.frame(jjmat) > jjmat['AB', ] Error: subscript out of bounds > jjdf['AB',] xyz tuv qrs ABC 1 3 5 > jjmat[, 'tu'] Error: subscript out of bounds

I'm not sure what is going on with this one -- maybe it will make sense to someone. R1.9.0 under Windows 2000. 1) Start up R. 2) search() # works as expected 3) library(fBasics) # from Rmetrics # but at least one of its required packages is not present on the machine 4) search() # nothing appears at all but the prompt Once all of the required packages are present, then step 3 no longer

In 2.0.1 the command help.search('goodness of fit') comes up empty. "ks.test" is what I was looking for, though perhaps there could be others? Patrick Burns Burns Statistics patrick@burns-stat.com +44 (0)20 8525 0696 http://www.burns-stat.com (home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")

The assignment form of 'formals' strips attributes (or something close to that) from the values in the list. This wasn't intentional, was it? The current behavior (2.0.0 through 2.1.0 on Windows at least): > fjj <- function() x > formals(fjj) <- list(x=c(a=2, b=4)) > fjj function (x = c(2, 4)) x Previous behavior: > fjj <- function() x > formals(fjj)

Hi R-users Can the users let me know how to do MGARCH estimate (Bivariate GARCH) and volatility forecast for 2 variables in R. thanks and regards snvk

I have a function declared thus. FirstEigenvectorBoundary.Training <- function(InputFileName='C:/Samples2/PT_Amp.txt', Header=TRUE, Colour="red") Inside the function, I have the following call out<-list(x=Eigenvectors[2:(NumMetricsSelected+1),1], y=-0.8, z=NumMetricsSelected); NumMetricsSelected has the value 2 and Eigenvectors has the following form [,1]

In the details section for 'all.equal' (in the paragraph on complex values) it says 'all.numeric.numeric'. I presume that should be 'all.equal.numeric'. When two integer vectors differ, it is possible to get overflow: > set.seed(1) > r1 <- .Random.seed > set.seed(2) > r2 <- .Random.seed > all.equal(r1, r2) [1] "Mean relative difference:

I'm not sure if this has much significance or not -- but it sounds rather ominous. It doesn't appear to be new as it happens with 2.0.0 in Linux (but the formatting of the warning messages has improved). > contour(array(3e10, c(10,10), list(1:10, 11:20))) Warning: stack imbalance in 'contour', 20 then 24 Warning: stack imbalance in '.Internal', 19 then 23 Warning:

The two statements below with 'names' are conceptually the same. The second performs the desired operation while the first does not. > xx <- list(A=c(a=1, b=2)) > names(xx$A[1]) <- "changed" > xx $A a b 1 2 > names(xx$A)[1] <- "changed" > xx $A changed b 1 2 This is observed in 2.4.0 on Linux as well as 2.7.0 and 2.8.0

I have read some very good reviews comparing R (or Splus) to SAS. Does anyone know if there are any reviews comparing R (or Splus) to Stata? I am trying to get others to try R in my department, and I have never used Stata. Regards, -Cody Cody Hamilton, Ph.D Institute for Health Care Research and Improvement Baylor Health Care System (214) 265-3618 This e-mail, facsimile, or letter