Matrix columns in data frame generate error in missRanger

[saudiwin]

Hi -

I've been a big fan/user of this package for a while, so I thought I would contribute a bug report on an issue I just encountered. Essentially, if one of the columns in a data frame is not a vector, the code will error without explanation because the column names don't transfer into a matrix of missing values (dataNA). It appears to happen at this line of code:

dataNA <- is.na(data[, visitSeq, drop = FALSE])

Some reproducible code is below:

# reproducible example

library(missRanger)

irisWithNA <- generateNA(iris, seed = 34)

# scale some variables

irisWithNA$Sepal.Length <- scale(irisWithNA$Sepal.Length)

class(irisWithNA$Sepal.Length)

try(missRanger(irisWithNA, pmm.k = 3, num.trees = 100))

# convert back to vector

irisWithNA$Sepal.Length <- c(scale(irisWithNA$Sepal.Length))

missRanger(irisWithNA, pmm.k = 3, num.trees = 100)

It's not really a bug per se, just either some missing pre-processing or a need for an informative error message. I feel like it would be worthwhile to address given how common the scale function is in R.

[mayer79]

Thanks a lot for reporting this one.

I don't think it is good practice to use a degenerate matrix instead of a vector. Still I will try to add a meaningful error message for such input.