[R] How to ignore data

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 7:36 PM, Steve Sidney <sbsidney at mweb.co.za> wrote:
> Oh dear oh dear!!! another arrogant statistician/scientist
>
> One asks for help and instead one gets an ear full!!!
>
> So much for the much vaunted helpful R community.
>
> But thanks anyway, I guess you were trying........

 Steve,

 we're statisticians. we love data. we hate seeing it go to waste.
every zero, every one, every NA value is dear to our hearts. Bert was
showing the same concern that a mother does for her children. Don't
hate him for that.

  Knowing you have 100 values with about 5-10% 0/1 values is half the
story we need - if the remaining 90-95% are in the thousands then
clearly these low ones are failures, and everyone on this list will
say "treat as missing values, do X = X[X>1] and carry on". However if
the real values are in the tens and units then maybe something is
going on. You did say removing them hasn't affected previous analyses,
but some more data would help - we just love data...

 Barry