[R] e1071::skewness and psych::skew return NaN

[Stephen Politzer-Ahles]

Hello everyone,

Does anyone know what would cause the skewness() function (from
e1071), as well as skew() from psych, to return a value of NaN?

I have a vector of positively-skewed data
(https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6-m45Jvl3ZmYzlHRVRHRURzbVk/edit?usp=sharing)
which these functions return a value for like normal:

> skewness( data ) # returns 1.400405

but when I instead give those functions the log-transformed data they return NaN

> skewness( log( data ) ) #returns NaN

The same occurs when I feed the function data transformed by reflected
reciprocal

> skewness( max(data) - 1/data ) ) #returns NaN

The vector has no missing values (and if it did, I would get NA rather
than NaN, and the function wouldn't return a number when I give it the
raw data).

Best,
Steve

--
Stephen Politzer-Ahles
University of Kansas
Linguistics Department
http://people.ku.edu/~sjpa/