[R] Multiple missing values

[Gabor Grothendieck]

NA, Inf, -Inf, NaN would give you 4 possibilities and is.finite would
check if its any of them:

> x <- c(1, NA, 2, Inf, 3, -Inf, 4, NaN, 5)
> is.finite(x)
[1]  TRUE FALSE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE

You might need to map them all to NA before using it with various
functions depending on how the functions deal with these values.

Other possibilities are to have an attribute with a factor defining
the type of each NA.

x <- c(1, NA, 2, NA, 3, NA)
attr(x, "type.of.na") <- factor(c("A", "B", "A"))

and depending on how much work you are prepared to do you could define
a new R class that handles objects with such an attribute.

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 9:33 AM, John <john.macinnes at ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> Does anyone know, or know documentation that describes, how to declare
> multiple values in R as missing that does not involve coding them as NA? I
> wish to be able to treate values as missing, while still retaining codes
> that describe the reason for the value being missing.
>
> Thanks
>
> John MAcInnes
>
>
> --
> Professor John MacInnes
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