Thanks Marc, That was it.
For the last 30 years, I'd write my own code, in FORTRAN, C++, or even Java, to do whatever statistical analysis I needed. When at the office, sometimes I could use SAS, but that hasn't been an option for me in years. This is the first time I have had to load real data into R (instead of generating random data to use while playing with some of the stats functions, or manually typing dummy data). I take it, then, that the result of loading data is a data frame, and not just a matrix or array. Using something like "refdata18[, 1]" feels rather alien, but I'm sure I'll quickly get used to it. I'd seen it before in the R docs, but it didn't register that I had to use it to get the functions of most interest to me to recognise my data as a vector of numbers, given I'd provided only a vector of integers as input. Thanks Ted Marc Schwartz wrote: > > on 09/21/2008 08:01 PM Ted Byers wrote: >> I have a number of files containing anywhere from a few dozen to a few >> thousand integers, one per record. >> >> The statement "refdata18 = >> read.csv("K:\\MerchantData\\RiskModel\\Capture.Week.18.csv", header = >> TRUE,na.strings="")" works fine, and if I type refdata18, I get the >> integers >> displayed, one value per record (along with a record number). However, >> when >> I try " fitdistr(refdata18,"negative binomial")", or >> hist.scott(refdata18, >> prob = TRUE), I get an error: >> >> Error in fitdistr(refdata18, "negative binomial") : >> 'x' must be a non-empty numeric vector >> Or >> Error in hist.default(x, nclass.scott(x), prob = prob, xlab = xlab, ...) >> : >> 'x' must be numeric >> >> How can it not recognise integers as numbers? >> >> Thanks >> >> Ted > > 'refdata18' is a data frame and the two functions are expecting a > numeric vector. > > If you use: > > fitdistr(refdata18[, 1], "negative binomial") > > or > > hist(refdata18[, 1]) > > you should get a suitable result, presuming that the first column in the > data frame is a numeric vector. > > Use: > > str(refdata18) > > to get a sense for the structure of the data frame, including the column > names, which you could then use, instead of the above index based syntax. > > HTH, > > Marc Schwartz > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > 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. > > -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Why-isn%27t-R-recognising-integers-as-numbers--tp19600308p19600803.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.