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inaccuracy in qbinom with partial argument matching

3 messages · Peter Ruckdeschel, Brian Ripley, Petr Savicky

#
Hi,

I found the following strange effect with
qbinom & partial argument matching

p0 <- pbinom(0, size = 3, prob = 0.25)
qbinom(p0,      size = 3, prob = 0.25)  ## 0 o.k.
qbinom(p0-0.05, size = 3, prob = 0.25)  ## 0 o.k.

## positional matching:
qbinom(p0,             3,        0.25)  ## 0 o.k.

## partial argument matching:
qbinom(p0     , s = 3,    p    = 0.25)  ## 1 ???
qbinom(p0-0.05, s = 3,    p    = 0.25)  ## 1 ???
qbinom(p0-0.06, s = 3,    p    = 0.25)  ## 0 o.K.

Unfortunately I have no I idea how to fix this.

I guess however that this will happen for other
cases as well, but I have not pursued this further.

Best, Peter

platform       i386-pc-mingw32
arch           i386
os             mingw32
system         i386, mingw32
status
major          2
minor          5.0
year           2007
month          04
day            23
svn rev        41293
language       R
version.string R version 2.5.0 (2007-04-23)
#
On Thu, 28 Jun 2007, Peter Ruckdeschel wrote:

            
You use a call that specifies your intentions accurately.  This is not 
'partial argument matching': 'p' is an exact match to the first argument 
of
function (p, size, prob, lower.tail = TRUE, log.p = FALSE)

and that is how argument matching in R is documented to work.

The 'inaccuracy' is in the diagnosis: please see the FAQ.
#
Let me add an explanation, why
  qbinom(p0     , s = 3,    p    = 0.25)
does not produce an error message about missing "prob" argument:
Since "size" and "p" arguments are given, p0 is used for
the third argument and not for the first.

Although the behavior is logical, it may not be immediately clear.
I do not see this case explicitly in FAQ or R-intro.pdf 10.3.

Petr.