[Rd] formula(CO2)

Gabor Grothendieck ggrothendieck at gmail.com
Mon Jul 16 16:16:10 CEST 2007


Following up on your comments it seems formula.data.frame just creates
a formula whose lhs is the first column name and whose rhs is made up
of the remaining column names.  It ignores the "formula" attribute.

In fact, CO2 does have a formula attribute but its not extracted by
formula.data.frame:

> CO2 at formula
uptake ~ conc | Plant
> formula(CO2)
Plant ~ Type + Treatment + conc + uptake

Is this really how its supposed to work???

On 7/16/07, Ted Harding <ted.harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 16-Jul-07 13:28:50, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > The formula attribute of the builtin CO2 dataset seems a bit strange:
> >
> >> formula(CO2)
> > Plant ~ Type + Treatment + conc + uptake
> >
> > What is one supposed to do with that?  Certainly its not suitable
> > for input to lm and none of the examples in ?CO2 use the above.
>
> I think one is supposed to ignore it! (Or maybe be inspired to
> write a mail to the list ... ).
>
> I couldn't find anything that looked like the above formula from
> str(CO2). But I did spot that the order of terms in the formula:
> Plant, Type, treatment, conc, uptake, is the same as the order
> of the "columns" in the dataframe.
>
> So I tried:
>
>  D<-data.frame(x=(1:10),y=(1:10))
>
>  formula(D)
>  x ~ y
>
> So, lo and behold, D has a formula!
>
> Or does it? Maybe if you give formula() a dataframe, it simply
> constructs one from the "columns".
>
> Best wishes,
> Ted.
>
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> E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
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> Date: 16-Jul-07                                       Time: 14:57:28
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