(1) What has this to do with recursion?

(2) You probably need to use ifelse().  I believe that this is
(in effect) an FAQ.

    cheers,

        Rolf Turner

On 20/05/11 07:42, Tremblay, Pierre-Olivier wrote:
Hi,

I created a function for obtaining the normal cumulative distribution (I
know all this already exists in R, I just wanted to verify my
understanding of it).  below is the code I came up with.

cdf<-function(x) {
         erf<-function(x) {
            # approximation to the error function (erf) of the
            # normal cumulative distribution function
            # from Winitzki (2008)
               a<- 0.147
               partc<- 1+a*x^2
               partb<- 4/pi+a*x^2
               parta<- -x^2*(partb/partc)
               erf<- sqrt(1-exp(parta))
               erf
                  }
     #  cumulative density function
       cdf<- 1/2*(1+erf(x/sqrt(2)))
       cdf
     }

The erf(x) produces positive values whatever the sign of x.  Instead of
obtaining the expected sigmoid shape of the erf() I end up with a
positive values V shape.  erf(x) should be negative for negative values
of x.  I figure I need some form of conditional statement in the above
code but all my attempts at using "if" and "for" failed miserably.
Clearly, I don't understand how to use them properly in R.  If anyone
could point me in the right direction as on how to code conditional
events in R that would be much appreciated.

many thanks in advance

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