model.frame deficiency
At least for me, the problem is not to do with the length of formula. You have a term in the formula with a very long name, and there are several places that can go wrong. For example, for the N=20 version I get
model.frame(as.formula(temp2), tdata) -> foo foo
Error in do.call("data.frame", rval) :
variable names are limited to 256 bytes
For the N=50 case the sticking point is
varnames <- sapply(vars, deparse, width.cutoff = 500)[-1L]
which could be rewritten as
varnames <- sapply(vars, function(x) paste(deparse(x,width.cutoff=500), collapse=' '))[-1L]
but you would still not be able to print the result.
On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Terry Therneau wrote:
The model.frame function has trouble with a certain type of really long
formula. Here is a test:
tname <- paste('var', 1:50, sep='')
tmat <- matrix(rnorm(500), ncol=50, dimnames=list(NULL, tname))
tdata <- data.frame(tmat)
temp1 <- paste( paste(tname, tname, sep='='), collapse=', ')
temp2 <- paste("~1 + cbind(", temp1, ")")
model.frame(as.formula(temp2), tdata)
This came out of a user report to me. Coxph with a very long formula
(which does work) followed by a call to survexp leads to a call like the
above but using my "ratetable" function instead of "cbind".
My machine's details:
R version 2.10.0 (2009-10-26)
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=C
[5] LC_MONETARY=C LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
attached base packages:
[1] grDevices datasets splines graphics utils stats
methods
[8] base
Editorial comment: I said "deficiency" not "bug" above, as I'm not so
sure how good a model with 75 variables might be in the first place.
(Though in this case the user is pretty savvy.)
Terry Therneau
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Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595