[R] problem with fitdistr ?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

It works under the versions 7.2-0 dated Jan 22 or later: that on CRAN is 
dated Jan 14 and predates 7.1-14.

Since R-devel is `under development', the pieces are not at all times in 
sync.

On 18 Feb 2004, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > Which version of MASS (not that you gave me any credit)?  This works in 
> > the current 7.1-14.
> 
> Odd things are happening for me with r-devel, though:
> 
> > library(MASS)
> > fitdistr(rnorm(100),"Normal")
> Error in dn[[2]] : subscript out of bounds
> > fitdistr(rnorm(100),"Normal",start=list(mean=0,sd=1))
> Error in fitdistr(rnorm(100), "Normal", start = list(mean = 0, sd =
> > 1)) :
>         supplying pars for the Normal is not supported
> > x <- fitdistr(rnorm(100),"normal")
> > x
> Error in dn[[2]] : subscript out of bounds
> > str(x)
> List of 2
>  $ estimate: num 0.217
>  $ sd      : num 0.99
>  - attr(*, "class")= chr "fitdistr"
> 
> And the rest of the story is that this bit of print.fitdistr computes
> "ans" without dimnames and thus refers to dn[[2]] before there's
> anything there:
> 
>     ans <- format(rbind(x$estimate, x$sd), digits = digits)
>     ans[1, ] <- sapply(ans[1, ], function(x) paste("", x))
>     ans[2, ] <- sapply(ans[2, ], function(x) paste("(", x, ")",
>         sep = ""))
>     dn <- dimnames(ans)
>     dn[[1]] <- rep("", 2)
>     dn[[2]] <- paste(substring("      ", 1, (nchar(ans[2, ]) -
>         nchar(dn[[2]]))%/%2), dn[[2]])
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595