Stata/Rstudio evil attributes

On Apr 10, 2021, at 11:59 AM, Viechtbauer, Wolfgang (SP) <wolfgang.viechtbauer at maastrichtuniversity.nl> wrote:

Dear Roger,

The problem is this. qss() looks like this:

if (is.matrix(x)) {
  [...]
}
if (is.vector(x)) {
  [...]
}
qss

Now let's check these if() statements:
is.vector(B$x) # TRUE
is.vector(D$x) # FALSE
is.matrix(B$x) # FALSE
is.matrix(D$x) # FALSE

is.vector(D$x) being FALSE may be surprising, but see ?is.vector: "is.vector returns TRUE if x is a vector of the specified mode having no attributes other than names. It returns FALSE otherwise." And as D$x shows, this vector has additional attributes.

So, with 'D', qss() returns the qss function (c.f., qss(B$x) and qss(D$x)) which makes no sense. So, the internal logic in qss() needs to be fixed.

In accordance with the usual R-help etiquette I first tried to contact the
maintainer of the haven package, i.e. RStudio, which elicited the response: "since
the error is occurring outside RStudio we?re not responsible, so try Stack
Overflow".  This is pretty much what I would have expected from the capitalist
running dogs they are.  Admittedly, the error is probably due to some unforeseen

This kind of bashing is really silly. Can you tell us again how much you paid for the use of the haven package?

Best,
Wolfgang

-----Original Message-----
From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Koenker, Roger W
Sent: Saturday, 10 April, 2021 11:26
To: r-help
Subject: [R] Stata/Rstudio evil attributes

As shown in the reproducible example below, I used the RStudio function haven() to
read a Stata .dta file, and then tried to do some fitting with the resulting
data.frame.  This produced an error from my fitting function rqss() in the package
quantreg.  After a bit of frustrated cursing, I converted the data.frame, D, to a
matrix A, and thence back to a data.frame B, and tried again, which worked as
expected.  The conversion removed the attributes of D.  My question is:  why were
the attributes inhibiting the fitting?

In accordance with the usual R-help etiquette I first tried to contact the
maintainer of the haven package, i.e. RStudio, which elicited the response: "since
the error is occurring outside RStudio we?re not responsible, so try Stack
Overflow".  This is pretty much what I would have expected from the capitalist
running dogs they are.  Admittedly, the error is probably due to some unforeseen
infelicity in my rqss() coding, but it does seem odd that attributes could have
such a drastic  effect.  I would be most grateful for any insight the R commune
might offer.

#require(haven) # for reading dta file
#Ddta <- read_dta(?foo.dta")
#D <- with(Ddta, data.frame(y = access_merg, x = meannets_allhh, z = meanhh))
#save(D, file = "D.Rda")
con <- url("http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger/research/data/D.Rda")
load(con)

# If I purge the Stata attributes in D:
A <- as.matrix(D)
B <- as.data.frame(A)

# This works:
with(D,plot(x, y, cex = .5, col = "grey"))
taus <- 1:4/5
require(quantreg)
for(i in 1:length(taus)){
  f <- rqss(y ~ qss(x, constraint = "I", lambda = 1), tau = taus[i], data = B)
  plot(f, add = TRUE, col = i)
}
# However, the same code with data = D, does not.  Why?