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G'day all, I believe that this is related to PR#1717 (filed under not-reproducible) which was reported for a version of R that is a quite a bit older than the ones used in for this report. But I noticed this behaviour under R 2.1.1 and R 2.2.0 on my linux box and under R 2.0.1 and R 2.1.1 on my Windows box. I recently ran the examples for fitdistr in the MASS library and on my linux machine I get the following results: > library(MASS) > set.seed(123) > x <- rgamma(100, shape = 5, rate = 0.1) > fitdistr(x, "gamma") shape rate 6.45947303 0.13593172 (0.89052006) (0.01948648) > fitdistr(x, dgamma, list(shape = 1, rate = 0.1), lower = 0.01) shape rate 2.156761461 0.010000000 (0.277607887) (0.001433778) I find the second result quite extraordinary. O.k., the likelihood that is maximised is quite flat along a certain direction, but I don't think that it is so flat that it should fool the underlying optimisation routine into believing that it has converged. Moreover: > fitdistr(x, dgamma, list(shape = 1, rate = 0.1), lower = 0.001) shape rate 6.48686551 0.13651012 (0.89438949) (0.01956818) As far as I can tell, the problem is with L-BFGS-B hitting the lower bound and stopping, the same problem as reported in #1717. I tried the same comments on my Windows box and the result is as attached below (together with the system information that bug.report produces on that machine). Looking at the output given on the Windows machine, I am actually amazed that my Linux box didn't give me any of those warning messages --- the R input/output given above is cut and paste. I am not aware of any fiddling with ptions regarding warning messages by any configurations files anywhere on my linux system; and I ran the same commands using `R --vanilla' on the linux box and did not get any warning messages. Cheers, Berwin --WWm7B+u2U4 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Description: Manifestation of bug on a Windows machine Content-Disposition: inline; filename="Bug.txt" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > set.seed(123) > x <- rgamma(100, shape = 5, rate = 0.1) > fitdistr(x, "gamma") shape rate 6.48592894 0.13649147 (0.89425721) (0.01956555) Warning messages: 1: NaNs produced in: dgamma(x, shape, scale, log) 2: NaNs produced in: dgamma(x, shape, scale, log) 3: NaNs produced in: dgamma(x, shape, scale, log) > fitdistr(x, dgamma, list(shape = 1, rate = 0.1), lower = 0.01) shape rate 2.156761461 0.010000000 (0.277607888) (0.001433778) Warning message: bounds can only be used with method L-BFGS-B in: optim(start, mylogfn, x = x, hessian = TRUE, ...) > fitdistr(x, dgamma, list(shape = 1, rate = 0.1), lower = 0.001) shape rate 6.48686551 0.13651012 (0.89438949) (0.01956818) Warning message: bounds can only be used with method L-BFGS-B in: optim(start, mylogfn, x = x, hessian = TRUE, ...) --please do not edit the information below-- Version: platform = i386-pc-mingw32 arch = i386 os = mingw32 system = i386, mingw32 status = major = 2 minor = 1.1 year = 2005 month = 06 day = 20 language = R Windows XP Professional (build 2600) Service Pack 2.0 Locale: LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252 Search Path: .GlobalEnv, package:MASS, package:methods, package:stats, package:graphics, package:grDevices, package:utils, package:datasets, Autoloads, package:base --WWm7B+u2U4 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Description: message body text Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit --please do not edit the information below-- Version: platform = i686-pc-linux-gnu arch = i686 os = linux-gnu system = i686, linux-gnu status = Under development (unstable) major = 2 minor = 2.0 year = 2005 month = 08 day = 26 svn rev = 35424 language = R Locale: C Search Path: .GlobalEnv, package:methods, package:stats, package:graphics, package:grDevices, package:utils, package:datasets, Autoloads, package:base --WWm7B+u2U4-- ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel