Object in R is integer but has length of 8364 - r

I have a data.frame from which I extracted a column called Volume. The code is as follows:
volume = aapl.us$Volume
In the console, I am told the following:
typeof(volume)
# "integer"
length(volume)
# 8364
How is this possible?

The case that you encounter is not strange behavior in R. It may sound unintuitive at first to users of other programming language where there is a distinction between a scalar (single number) and a vector (one-dimensional array).
R does not have "scalar" data. Simplest data structure in R is a vector, and it can be a numeric, character, factor, integer, logical, or complex-valued vector. A single number in R is a "vector of length one", and not a "scalar". A vector must contain data of the same type.
typeof() returns the type of a variable (see the link for further information). In your case, Volume is a vector that contains integers, and that vector has length 8364.

Related

How do I convert data from integer and dbl to numeric in R

As stated above, I'm trying to convert data in my dataframe from integer/dbl to numeric but I end up with dbl for both columns.
Original dataset
Code I'm using to convert to numeric;
data$price <- as.numeric(data$price)
data$lot_size <- as.numeric(data$lot_size)
The dataframe I end up with:
The dataframe I end up with
Dataset I have been working with: https://dasl.datadescription.com/datafile/housing-prices-ge19
"numeric is identical to double"
https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/base/html/numeric.html
> typeof(as.numeric(3L))
[1] "double"
> typeof(as.integer(3L))
[1] "integer"
The stuff with types in R is a bit confusing. I would say that numeric is not really a data type at all in R. You will never get the answer numeric from the typeof function.
Both, integers and doubles are considered to be numeric and the function is.numeric will return TRUE for either.
On the other hand, numeric is more often a synonym for double.
The functions numeric and as.numeric are the same as double and as.double.
Edit:
With a bit more research under my belt let me rephrase it like this:
'numeric' is the virtual superclass of both integer and double.
See for example getClass("numeric") and help(UseMethod) (first paragraph in the Details section).
Hadley says it better: Advanced R

What are character vectors made of?

"Alice" is a character vector of length 1. "Bob" is also a character vector of length 1, but it's clearly shorter. At face value, it appears that R's character are made out of something smaller than characters, but if you try to subset them, say "Alice"[1], you'll just get the original vector back. How does R internally make sense of this? What are character vectors actually made of?
You're mistaking vector length for string length.
In R common variables are all vectors containing whatever data you typed, so both are vectors that contain 1 string even if you don't assign a name to them.
If you want to check the size of each string, use nchar function:
nchar("Alice")
[1] 5
nchar("Bob")
[1] 3

vector - character/integer class (under the hood)

Starting to learn R, and I would appreciate some help understanding how R decides the class of different vectors. I initialize vec <- c(1:6) and when I perform class(vec) I get 'integer'. Why is it not 'numeric', because I thought integers in R looked like this: 4L
Also with vec2 <- c(1,'a',2,TRUE), why is class(vec2) 'character'? I'm guessing R picks up on the characters and automatically assigns everything else to be characters...so then it actually looks like c('1','a','2','TRUE') am I correct?
Type the following, you can see the help page of the colon operator.
?`:`
Here is one paragraph.
For numeric arguments, a numeric vector. This will be of type integer
if from is integer-valued and the result is representable in the R
integer type, otherwise of type "double" (aka mode "numeric").
So, in your example c(1:6), since 1 for the from argument can be representable in R as integer, the resulting sequence becomes integer.
By the way, c is not needed to create a vector in this case.
For the second question, since in a vector all the elements have to be in the same type, R will automatically convert all the elements to the same. In this case, it is possible to convert everything to be character, but it is not possible to convert "a" to be numeric, so it results in a character vector.

Why R returns NA when computing mean on non null matrix

I have a matrix composed by floating point numbers. I have checked and there are no missing values.
Recently, I have changed the column header from (e.g.):
2670
to
COLUMN-HEADER-A-2670
I am running the code provided by Nearest Template Prediction algorithm, that I cannot change.
I found that the error is probably located when computing mean over the column axis, for each row of the matrix, i.e.
exp.mean <- apply(exp.dataset,1,mean,na.rm=T)
The mean for all rows is forced to NA and the R console tells me
Browse[2]> exp.mean <- apply(exp.dataset,1,mean,na.rm=T)
There were 50 or more warnings (use warnings() to see the first 50)
1: In mean.default(newX[, i], ...) :
argument is not numeric or logical: returning NA
I think it is related with header type, but I cannot find anything that explains it. The algorithm worked with the previous column notation.
The answer is that in 3.1.0 read.table() returns a character vector instead of number vector if representing the table as a double matrix may lose accuracy.
From here:
type.convert() (and hence by default read.table()) returns a character vector or factor when representing a numeric input as a double would lose accuracy. Similarly for complex inputs.
If a file contains numeric data with unrepresentable numbers of decimal places that are intended to be read as numeric, specify colClasses in read.table() to be "numeric".

Problems importing csv file/converting from integer to double in R

Today I have finally decided to start climbing R's steep learning curve. I have spent a few hours and I managed to import my dataset and do a few other basic things, but I am having trouble with the data type: a column which contains decimals is imported as integer, and conversion to double changes the values.
In trying to get a small csv file to put here as an example I discovered that the problem only happens when the data file is too large (my original file is a 1048418 by 12 matrix, but even with "only" 5000 rows I have the same problem. When I only have 100, 1000 or even 2000 rows the column is imported correctly as double).
Here is a smaller dataset (still 500kb, but again, if the dataset is small the problem is not replicated). The code is
> ex <- read.csv("exampleshort.csv",header=TRUE)
> typeof(ex$RET)
[1] "integer"
Why is the column of returns being imported as integer when the file is large, when it is clearly of the type double?
The worst thing is that if I try to convert it to double, the values are changed
> exdouble <- as.double(ex$RET)
> typeof(exdouble)
[1] "double"
> ex$RET[1:5]
[1] 0.005587 -0.005556 -0.005587 0.005618 -0.001862
2077 Levels: -0.000413 -0.000532 -0.001082 -0.001199 -0.0012 -0.001285 -0.001337 -0.001351 -0.001357 -0.001481 -0.001486 -0.001488 ... 0.309524
> exdouble[1:5]
[1] 1305 321 322 1307 41
This is not the only column that is imported wrong, but I figured that if I find a solution for one column, I should be able to sort the other ones out. Here is some more information:
> sapply(ex,class)
PERMNO DATE COMNAM SICCD PRC RET RETX SHROUT VWRETD VWRETX EWRETD EWRETX
"integer" "integer" "factor" "integer" "factor" "factor" "factor" "integer" "numeric" "numeric" "numeric" "numeric"
They should be in this order: integer, date, string, integer, double, double, double, integer, double, double, double, double (the types are probably wrong, but hopefully you will get what I mean)
See the help for read.csv: ?read.csv. Here is the relevant section:
colClasses: character. A vector of classes to be assumed for the
columns. Recycled as necessary, or if the character vector
is named, unspecified values are taken to be ‘NA’.
Possible values are ‘NA’ (the default, when ‘type.convert’ is
used), ‘"NULL"’ (when the column is skipped), one of the
atomic vector classes (logical, integer, numeric, complex,
character, raw), or ‘"factor"’, ‘"Date"’ or ‘"POSIXct"’.
Otherwise there needs to be an ‘as’ method (from package
‘methods’) for conversion from ‘"character"’ to the specified
formal class.
Note that ‘colClasses’ is specified per column (not per
variable) and so includes the column of row names (if any).
Good luck with your quest to learn R. It's difficult, but so much fun after you get past the first few stages (which I admit do take some time).
try this and fix the others accordingly:
ex <- read.csv("exampleshort.csv",header=TRUE,colClasses=c("integer","integer","factor","integer","numeric","factor","factor","integer","numeric","numeric","numeric","numeric"), na.strings=c("."))
As BenBolker points out, the colClasses argument is probably not needed. However, note that using the colClasses argument can make the operation faster, especially with a large dataset.
na.strings must be specified. See the following section in ?read.csv:
na.strings: a character vector of strings which are to be interpreted
as ‘NA’ values. Blank fields are also considered to be
missing values in logical, integer, numeric and complex
fields.
For reference purposes (this should not be used as the solution because the best solution is to import the data correctly in one step):
RET was not imported as an integer. It was imported as a factor. For future reference, if you want to convert a factor to a numeric, use
new_RET <-as.numeric(as.character(ex$RET))

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