[R] Curious about pairwise limits with cov()

[Doran, Harold]

The help for cov() clearly notes that pairwise only works with pearson. I'm curious why as it is surely not computational. Certainly an analyst knows the nature of the missingness in their data and if it's not MCAR then applying pairwise to spearman would have the same inferential consequence as when pearson is used with data that are also not MCAR.

Looking for enlightenment here.

Thanks,
Harold


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