"BDR" == Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>
on Tue, 10 Aug 2004 05:47:28 +0100 (BST) writes:
BDR> On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, Ross Ihaka wrote:
>> > When part of a time series is extracted, the time series
>> > lost. e.g.,
>> > x <- ts(1:10)
>> > x[1:4]
>> >
>> > It would be nice if there was a subsetting function [.ts to avoid
>> > problem. However, it is beyond my R-coding ability to produce
>> > thing. Is someone willing to do it?
BDR> There is a [.ts, in src/library/stats/R/ts.R, and it is
documented
BDR> (?"[.ts").
>> Have you had a look at "window"? The problem with "["
>> its that it can produce non-contiguous sets of values.
BDR> Yes.
indeed. window() is what we have been advocation for a long
time now ... (but see below).
BDR> If you look in the sources for [.ts you will see,
BDR> commented, the code that was once there to handle cases
BDR> where the index was evenly spaced. But it was removed
BDR> long ago in favour of window(). I tried to consult the
BDR> logs, but it seems that in the shift from CVS to SVN
BDR> recently I can't get at them. I think the rationale
BDR> was that x[ind] should always produce an object of the
BDR> same class.
well, that can't have been the only rationale since now
x[ind] is *not* of the same class - when the "ts" property is
lost in any case.
I don't much like the current behavior of "[.ts" either.
It should either work by returning the "ts" object in the
equidistant case and give a warning (at least) in the
non-equidistant case.
OTOH, intuitively, when 'ind' has length 1, x[ind] should just
give a number... [grumble..]
But maybe it's only a very small performance hit when that
continues to carry the "ts" class attribute along.
If we think of the data.frame analogue, we might consider
defining "[[.ts" for extracting numbers and "[.ts" to always
return a time series or an error.
But that is probably too much incompatible to current behavior.
Martin