>>On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 09:46:57AM +0100, S Ellison wrote: >> >>... only you probably shouldn't be doing that at all. Words like 'bias' >>spring to mind... >> >> Woudn't it be better to accept the NA's and find methods that handle them as >> genuinely missing. >> R is usually quite good at that.
And Gabor Csardi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> replied >Although in some cases the proper handling of NA values is to treat >them az zeros.... Yup. And sometimes not... >I like this list because if you ask a question, >they don't only solve it immediately (in five different ways), but they >persuade you that what you're trying to do is actually >incorrect/stupid/uninteresting or your problem just makes no sense at all. >:) Being a chemist, I have to confess that I can't always tell that what I'm about to attempt is barking, trivial, uninteresting or better done a completely different way; myself, I'd rather be warned too often than left to dig my own pit and fall into it ... On NA's vs zero, I usually have the reverse problem in my corner of the world; folk will often call nondetects 'missing', which is also often a silly thing to do; nondetect means 'I looked and it was too low to see' but NA means 'I didn't look'. All that leaves me a bit nervous about replacing NA with 0 and vice versa ... hence the knee-jerk. Apologies if I'm teaching egg-sucking to an expert. S ******************************************************************* This email and any attachments are confidential. Any use, co...{{dropped}} ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.