[Rd] Inconsistency between rowMeans documentation and reality?

[Gavin Simpson]

Dear List,

I'm not even sure this is an issue or not, but ?rowMeans has:

Value:

     A numeric or complex array of suitable size, or a vector if the
     result is one-dimensional.  The ‘dimnames’ (or ‘names’ for a
     vector result) are taken from the original array.

     If there are no values in a range to be summed over (after
     removing missing values with ‘na.rm = TRUE’), that component of
     the output is set to ‘0’ (‘*Sums’) or ‘NA’ (‘*Means’), consistent
     with ‘sum’ and ‘mean’.

However the output of mean() and rowMeans() is not exactly the same when
all supplied values are missing.

> mean(NA, na.rm = TRUE)
[1] NaN
> mean(rep(NA, 5), na.rm = TRUE)
[1] NaN
> rowMeans(matrix(rep(NA, 5), ncol = 5), na.rm = TRUE)
[1] NA

So in one sense, the outputs are not consistent:

> is.nan(mean(rep(NA, 5), na.rm = TRUE))
[1] TRUE
> is.nan(rowMeans(matrix(rep(NA, 5), ncol = 5), na.rm = TRUE))
[1] FALSE

but in another they are:

> is.na(mean(rep(NA, 5), na.rm = TRUE))
[1] TRUE
> is.na(rowMeans(matrix(rep(NA, 5), ncol = 5), na.rm = TRUE))
[1] TRUE

I'm not familiar enough with the details to know if this even matters,
but wonder if something in the documentation needs a change or tweak to
clarify what is returned. As I say, in one sense the outputs are not
consistent.

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.13.0 beta (2011-04-04 r55298)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8       LC_NUMERIC=C             
 [3] LC_TIME=en_GB.utf8        LC_COLLATE=en_GB.utf8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=C             LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.utf8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_GB.utf8       LC_NAME=C                
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C              LC_TELEPHONE=C           
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.utf8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C      

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
[7] base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_2.13.0

Thanks,

Gavin
-- 
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 Dr. Gavin Simpson             [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522
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