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Re: question on cor function

To: "Data Analytics Corp." <dataanalytics@earthlink.net>, <s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu>
Subject: Re: question on cor function
From: "William Dunlap" <wdunlap@tibco.com>
Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 09:37:29 -0700
In-reply-to: <4A02FB1C.2080303@earthlink.net>
References: <4A02FB1C.2080303@earthlink.net>
Thread-index: AcnPJpDNdSmjsQ9IRziK9WZwE+dtKQAA87Hw
Thread-topic: [S] question on cor function
cor(x,y,na.method="omit") will drop each row of x and y
that contains an NA in any column of x or y.  Thus, if
you give a subset of columns of x and/or y to it you may
get different rows omitted.  See help(cor) for details. 

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software Inc - Spotfire Division
wdunlap tibco.com  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: s-news-owner@lists.biostat.wustl.edu 
> [mailto:s-news-owner@lists.biostat.wustl.edu] On Behalf Of 
> Data Analytics Corp.
> Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 8:16 AM
> To: s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu
> Subject: [S] question on cor function
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm confused about what the cor function is producing.  I 
> have two data 
> frames: pat and att.  Each has 417 rows with missing data.  
> The first, 
> pat, has 4 columns; att has 30.  I want the correlations between each 
> column of pat with each column of att.  My results should be 
> a 30 by 4 
> matrix.  I used at first
> 
> t(cor(pat, att, na.method = "omit"))
> 
> and got my 30X4 matrix.  The first cell, which should be for the 
> correlation between pat[, 1] and att[, 1] is -0.24399252  But 
> then, just 
> for a check, I did cor(pat[, 1], att[, 1], na.method = 
> "omit") and got a 
> different answer!  I got 0.001174417.  What's going on???  
> According to 
> the Help file, the answer for my first statement with the transpose 
> should be "a matrix such that the [i,j] element is the covariance 
> (correlation) of x[,i] and either y[,j] or x[,j]. "  So the 
> [1,1] answer 
> should be the correlation between pat[, 1] and att[, 1] - but 
> it's not.  
> What am I missing?? Am I just not seeing the obvious??   I'm 
> using S+8.0 
> on a Vista machine.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Walt
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ________________________
> 
> Walter R. Paczkowski, Ph.D.
> Data Analytics Corp.
> 44 Hamilton Lane
> Plainsboro, NJ 08536
> ________________________
> (V) 609-936-8999
> (F) 609-936-3733
> dataanalytics@earthlink.net
> www.dataanalyticscorp.com
> 
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