No non-missing arguments warning when using min or max in reshape2
You get this warning because the min/max are applied to numeric of length 0 argument.
This reproduces the warning.
min(numeric(0))
[1] Inf
Warning message:
In min(numeric(0)) : no non-missing arguments to min; returning Inf
Note that for mean
you don't get the warning :
mean(numeric(0))
[1] NaN
It is just a warning that don't have any effect in the computation. You can suppress it using suppressWarnings
:
suppressWarnings(dcast(data=molten.iris,
Species~variable,value.var="value",
fun.aggregate=min))
EDIT
Above I am just answering the question: What's the meaning of the warning ? and why we have this min/max and not with mean function. The question why dcast
is applying the aggregate function to a vector of length 0, it is just a BUG and you should contact the package maintainer. I think the error comes from plyr::vaggregate
function used internally by dcast
,
plyr::vaggregate(1:3,1:3,min)
Error in .fun(.value[0], ...) :
(converted from warning) no non-missing arguments to min; returning Inf
Specially this line of code:
plyr::vaggregate
function (.value, .group, .fun, ..., .default = NULL, .n = nlevels(.group))
{
### some lines
....
### Here I don't understand the meaning of .value[0]
### since vector in R starts from 1 not zeros!!!
if (is.null(.default)) {
.default <- .fun(.value[0], ...)
}
## the rest of the function
.....
}