Skip to content

Question on funcion and npar

3 messages · Luciano La Sala, Marc Schwartz, Bert Gunter

Luciano La Sala
# 
Dear everyone,

The following function, taken from Quick-R, gets measures of central 
tendency and spread for a numeric vector x.

I can't figure out what the argument npar means in each instance.
Any tips will be most appreciated.

mysummary <- function(x, npar=TRUE, print=TRUE) {
   if (!npar) {
     center <- mean(x); spread <- sd(x)
   } else {
     center <- median(x); spread <- mad(x)
   }
   if (print & !npar) {
     cat("Mean=", center, "\n", "SD=", spread, "\n")
   } else if (print & npar) {
     cat("Median=", center, "\n", "MAD=", spread, "\n")
   }
   result <- list(center=center,spread=spread)
   return(result)
}
Marc Schwartz
# 
Presumably ?nonparametric?, since median()/mad() is used in lieu of mean()/sd(), if npar = TRUE.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz
Bert Gunter
# 
Have you gone thruway any T tutorials yet? This is a very basic question
that I do not believe would arise if you had done so.

The answer is that it is a logical that controls whether means and sd's or
medians and mads are calculated and returned. But I don't think this answer
will be comprehensible if you asked the question in the first place. Some
minimum effort must be made to learn the language details to understand
even simple function code.

Cheers,
Bert

On Tuesday, April 21, 2015, Luciano La Sala <lucianolasala at yahoo.com.ar>
wrote: