[R] Stata/Rstudio evil attributes

[Koenker, Roger W]

Wolfgang,

Thanks, this is _extremely_ helpful.

Roger

> On Apr 10, 2021, at 11:59 AM, Viechtbauer, Wolfgang (SP) <wolfgang.viechtbauer using maastrichtuniversity.nl> wrote:
> 
> Dear Roger,
> 
> The problem is this. qss() looks like this:
> 
> if (is.matrix(x)) {
>   [...]
> }
> if (is.vector(x)) {
>   [...]
> }
> qss
> 
> Now let's check these if() statements:
> is.vector(B$x) # TRUE
> is.vector(D$x) # FALSE
> is.matrix(B$x) # FALSE
> is.matrix(D$x) # FALSE
> 
> is.vector(D$x) being FALSE may be surprising, but see ?is.vector: "is.vector returns TRUE if x is a vector of the specified mode having no attributes other than names. It returns FALSE otherwise." And as D$x shows, this vector has additional attributes.
> 
> So, with 'D', qss() returns the qss function (c.f., qss(B$x) and qss(D$x)) which makes no sense. So, the internal logic in qss() needs to be fixed.
> 
>> In accordance with the usual R-help etiquette I first tried to contact the
>> maintainer of the haven package, i.e. RStudio, which elicited the response: "since
>> the error is occurring outside RStudio we’re not responsible, so try Stack
>> Overflow".  This is pretty much what I would have expected from the capitalist
>> running dogs they are.  Admittedly, the error is probably due to some unforeseen
> 
> This kind of bashing is really silly. Can you tell us again how much you paid for the use of the haven package?
> 
> Best,
> Wolfgang
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces using r-project.org] On Behalf Of Koenker, Roger W
>> Sent: Saturday, 10 April, 2021 11:26
>> To: r-help
>> Subject: [R] Stata/Rstudio evil attributes
>> 
>> As shown in the reproducible example below, I used the RStudio function haven() to
>> read a Stata .dta file, and then tried to do some fitting with the resulting
>> data.frame.  This produced an error from my fitting function rqss() in the package
>> quantreg.  After a bit of frustrated cursing, I converted the data.frame, D, to a
>> matrix A, and thence back to a data.frame B, and tried again, which worked as
>> expected.  The conversion removed the attributes of D.  My question is:  why were
>> the attributes inhibiting the fitting?
>> 
>> In accordance with the usual R-help etiquette I first tried to contact the
>> maintainer of the haven package, i.e. RStudio, which elicited the response: "since
>> the error is occurring outside RStudio we’re not responsible, so try Stack
>> Overflow".  This is pretty much what I would have expected from the capitalist
>> running dogs they are.  Admittedly, the error is probably due to some unforeseen
>> infelicity in my rqss() coding, but it does seem odd that attributes could have
>> such a drastic  effect.  I would be most grateful for any insight the R commune
>> might offer.
>> 
>> #require(haven) # for reading dta file
>> #Ddta <- read_dta(“foo.dta")
>> #D <- with(Ddta, data.frame(y = access_merg, x = meannets_allhh, z = meanhh))
>> #save(D, file = "D.Rda")
>> con <- url("http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger/research/data/D.Rda")
>> load(con)
>> 
>> # If I purge the Stata attributes in D:
>> A <- as.matrix(D)
>> B <- as.data.frame(A)
>> 
>> # This works:
>> with(D,plot(x, y, cex = .5, col = "grey"))
>> taus <- 1:4/5
>> require(quantreg)
>> for(i in 1:length(taus)){
>>   f <- rqss(y ~ qss(x, constraint = "I", lambda = 1), tau = taus[i], data = B)
>>   plot(f, add = TRUE, col = i)
>> }
>> # However, the same code with data = D, does not.  Why?