[R] inconsistency with cor() - "x must be numeric"

Joshua Wiley jwiley.psych at gmail.com
Mon Dec 13 23:06:47 CET 2010


Hi Fincher,

cor() only works on numeric arguments now (as of R 2.11 or 2.10 if
memory serves).  So, I would update your function to ensure that you
are only passing numeric data to cor() and the error should go away
(it will probably be easier on you if you can update your version of R
to the latest and greatest...quite a bit has changed since 2.8.1).  If
you post a reproducible example of your function, I'm sure we can help
update it.

Cheers,

Josh

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Justin Fincher <fincher at cs.fsu.edu> wrote:
> Howdy,
>   I have written a small function to generate a simple plot and my
> colleague is having an error when attempting to run it.  Essentially I loop
> through categories in a data frame and take the average value for each
> category The categories are in $V1, subset first then mean taken and
> concatenated to previous values using rbind(c("label",mean(data$V6)).  The
> result is a two-column matrix with labels in column one and values in column
> two.  Within the function I calculate the correlation of column two and
> another set of values that are part of the function.  On my computer (linux
> box running R 2.8.1) the function runs correctly.  On my colleague's
> computer (Windows box running R 2.12) the function throws an error at the
> cor() function call saying that "x must be numeric."  We are running on the
> exact same data set and source'ing the same function definition.  Any help
> would be appreciated.
>
> - Fincher
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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>



-- 
Joshua Wiley
Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles
http://www.joshuawiley.com/



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