On Sun, 12 Oct 2008, David Winsemius wrote:

Two follow-up questions:

A) I get an error message when using Harrell's describe() function on one of my variable, telling me that sum() is not meaningful for a difftime object. Why should sum() not be meaningful for a collection of interval lengths?

That's not what it actually says. It says it is 'not defined' -- it could be defined but it has not been. Just add a function sum.difftime() with appropriate code (and watch out that different difftime objects can be in different units).

describe(pref900)
Error in Summary.difftime(c(1075, 3429, 2915, 2002, 967, 1759, 532, 589,  :
'sum' not defined for "difftime" objects

summary() is informative and throws no error, but does not report means. Even with na.rm=TRUE, sum fails:
sum(pref900$deatht, na.rm=TRUE)
Error in Summary.difftime(c(NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,  :
'sum' not defined for "difftime" objects

My interest in the sum of difftime objects comes from my interest in calculating the number of person-years of observation in various categories. I have durations created by subtracting times.


B) The help pages are not particularly expansive regarding the output of deltat() but your answer suggests that it should work on non-time objects as well? Am I correct in assuming you meant that diff(x)/deltat(x) should be meaningful for any numeric x.

--
David Winsemius
R 2.7.1 / Mac OS 10.5.4 / Intel CPUs

s>
On Oct 12, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

?deltat

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 9:45 AM, Oliver Bandel
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Zitat von Gabor Grothendieck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

If you simply want successive differences use diff:

x <- seq(4)^2
diff(x)

tx <- ts(x)
diff(tx)
[...]

Oh, cool, thanks.

But what about  diff / delta_t ?

Do I have to calculate it by my own, or is there
already a function for making a difference-qoutient?

This would be fine to have, because for example
coming from space vs. time to velocity vs. time
and acceleration vs. time (and further derivatives)
are also a time-series.

The possibility of using the advantages of the time series class here,
would be fine.


Ciao,
Oliver


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--
Brian D. Ripley,                  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
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