From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Sep 23 11:56:44 1999
Subject: Re: max() and min() of nan/inf
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa dot psyc dot missouri dot edu>
Cc: Mirek Kwasniak <mirek at zind dot ikem dot pwr dot wroc dot pl>,         Olli Saarela <olli.saarela@kcl.fi>, Joao Cardoso <jcardoso@inescn.pt>,         help-octave@bevo.che.wisc.edu
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 11:55:34 -0500 (CDT)

On 23-Sep-1999, Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa dot psyc dot missouri dot edu> wrote:

| A few years ago, when MATLAB was developing their stats toolbox, they
| added the functions nansum, nanmean, nanmedian, nanvar, nanstd, nanmax,
| nanmin, nancov and nancorr.  These functions were identical to sum, mean,
| median, var, std, max, min, cov and corrcoef except that they ignored NaNs
| in the computations (they do not ignore Inf and -Inf).

| Does octave have any of those functions?

Not that I know of.

Why not just add an optional parameter to min, max, etc. that says to
ignore NaNs?

  Y = min (X, "ignore_nan");

Some questions:

  * If a vector is all NaNs, should the result be [] or NaN?

  * If a matrix has a column that is all NaNs, what should the result
    be for that column?  I'd say NaN, since an individual matrix
    element can't be [].  Then for consistency, the answer for the
    previous question should probably also be NaN.

jwe



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