From sgiannerini at gmail.com  Thu Sep 14 11:14:51 2006
From: sgiannerini at gmail.com (Simone Giannerini)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:14:51 +0200
Subject: [Rd] digits in summary.default
Message-ID: <3c12769c0609140214u4534ade5p3a4cbc22beb51781@mail.gmail.com>

Dear all,

the number of significant digits in summary default is

digits = max(3, getOption("digits") -  3)

on my platform this results to be 4. The point is that if you have,
say, integer data of magnitude greater than 10^3 the command summary
will produce heavily rounded results.
A simple example follow:

> x <- c(123456,234567,345678)

> x
[1] 123456 234567 345678

> summary(x)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
 123500  179000  234600  234600  290100  345700

# quite different from

> quantile(x)
      0%      25%      50%      75%     100%
123456.0 179011.5 234567.0 290122.5 345678.0

Is it  possible to adapt the number of significant digits to the
magnitude of the data?
The first thing that comes into my mind is
digits = nchar(trunc(max(x)))   #

If it is not possible then I think it would be nice to mention the
issue in the documentation.

Thanks for the attention,

Simone

> R.version
               _
platform       i386-pc-mingw32
arch           i386
os             mingw32
system         i386, mingw32
status
major          2
minor          3.1
year           2006
month          06
day            01
svn rev        38247
language       R
version.string Version 2.3.1 (2006-06-01)

> Sys.getlocale()
[1] "LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United
States.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United
States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252"
>

______________________________________________________

Simone Giannerini
Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche "Paolo Fortunati"
Universita' di Bologna
Via delle belle arti 41 - 40126  Bologna,  ITALY
Tel: +39 051 2098262  Fax: +39 051 232153




[Rd] digits in summary.default
Simone Giannerini