Mike: I offered no opinion -- and really didn't have any -- about the worthiness of any of the comments that were made. I just liked Brian's little quotable aside.
But since you bait me a bit ... In general, I believe that showing th 2-3 most "important" -- **not significant** -- digits **and no more** is desirable. By " most important" I mean the leftmost digits which are changing in the data (there are some caveats in the presence of extreme outliers). Printing more digits merely obfuscates the ability of the eye/brain to perceive the patterns of change in the data, the presumed intent of displaying it (not of storing it, of course). Displaying excessive digits to demonstrate (usually falsely) one's precision is evil. Clarity of communications is the standard we should aspire to. These views have been more eloquently expressed by A.S.C Ehrenburg and Howard Wainer among others... -- Bert Bert Gunter Nonclinical Statistics 7-7374 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mike Prager Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 11:46 AM To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: Re: [R] Summary shows wrong maximum I don't know about candidacy, and I'm not going to argue about "correctness," but it seems to me that the only valid reasons to limit precision of printing in a statistics program are (1) to save space and (2) to allow for machine limitations. This is neither. To chop off information and replace it with zeroes is just plain nasty. Bert Gunter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Folks: > > Is > > "So this is at best a matter of opinion, > and credentials do matter for opinions." > > -- Brian Ripley > > an R fortunes candidate? > > -- Bert Gunter > > > On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Oliver Czoske wrote: > > > On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Uwe Ligges wrote: > >> Sebastian Spaeth wrote: > >>> Hi all, > >>> I have a list with a numerical column "cum_hardreuses". By coincidence I > >>> discovered this: > >>> > >>>> max(libs[,"cum_hardreuses"]) > >>> [1] 1793 > >>> > >>>> summary(libs[,"cum_hardreuses"]) > >>> Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. > >>> 1 2 4 36 14 1790 > >>> > >>> (note the max value of 1790) Ouch this is bad! Anything I can do to > remedy > >>> this? Known bug? > >> > >> No, it's a feature! See ?summary: printing is done up to 3 significant > >> digits by default. > > > > Unfortunately, '1790' is printed with *four* significant digits, not > > three. The correct representation with three significant digits would have > > to employ scientific notation, 1.79e3. > > > > -- Mike Prager, NOAA, Beaufort, NC * Opinions expressed are personal and not represented otherwise. * Any use of tradenames does not constitute a NOAA endorsement. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
