William Dunlap <wdunlap <at> tibco.com> writes: > Use the str() function to see the internal structure of most > objects. In your case it would show something like: > > > Data <- data.frame(theData=round(sin(1:38),1)) > > x <- ts(Data[[1]], frequency=12) # or Data[,1] > > y <- ts(Data, frequency=12) > > str(x) > Time-Series [1:38] from 1 to 4.08: 0.8 0.9 0.1 -0.8 -1 -0.3 0.7 1 0.4 - 0.5 > ... > > str(y) > ts [1:38, 1] 0.8 0.9 0.1 -0.8 -1 -0.3 0.7 1 0.4 -0.5 ... > - attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2 > ..$ : NULL > ..$ : chr "theData" > - attr(*, "tsp")= num [1:3] 1 4.08 12 > > 'x' contains a vector of data and 'y' contains a 1-column matrix of > data. stl(x,"per") and stl(y, "per") give similar results as you > got. > > Evidently, stl() does not know that 1-column matrices can be treated > much the same as vectors and gives an error message. Thus you must > extract the one column into a vector: stl(y[,1], "per").
Thanks, William. Interesting that a 2D matrix of size Nx1 is treated as a different animal from a length N vector. It's a departure from math convention, and from what I'm accustomed to in Matlab. that R's vector seems more akin to a list, where the notion of orientation doesn't apply. I rummaged around the help files for str, summary, dput, args. This seems like a more complicated language than Matlab, VBA, or even C++'s STL of old (which was pretty thoroughly documented). A function like str() returns an object description, and I'm guessing the conventions with which the object is described depends a lot on the person who wrote the handling code for the class. The description for the variable y seems particularly elaborate. Would I be right in assuming that the notation is ad-hoc and not documented? For example, the two invocations str(x) and str(y) show a Time-Series and a ts. And there are many lines of output for str(y) that is heavy in punctuation. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.