R what does nan mean

It is a bit pity that? My comment only told you that applying mean on an empty "numeric" results in NaN without more reasoning. Rui Barradas's comment tried to reason this but was not accurate, as division by 0 is not always NaN , it can be Inf or -Inf. I once discussed about this in R: element-wise matrix division. However, we are getting close. So sum numeric 0 is 0. With this logic all NAs are removed before the function mean is applied. I once discussed about this in R: element-wise matrix division.

However, we are getting close. So sum numeric 0 is 0. With this logic all NAs are removed before the function mean is applied. In your cases you are applying mean to nothing all NAs are removed so NaN is returned. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. R: Why does mean NA, na. Asked 3 years, 3 months ago. Active 3 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 4k times. Quick example below mean NA, na. Improve this question. Zheyuan Li Glen Moutrie Glen Moutrie 3 3 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges. Because you then have a vector of length zero and a division by zero is NaN. As shown in the following example, we can use R as regular calculator :. If we have a complex vector, data frame or matrix, it might be complicated to identify the NaN values in our data.

In such a case, we can apply the is. The is. If we apply the is. In combination with the which R function, we can print the positions of our NaN values to the RStudio console:. And in combination with the sum function, we can count the amount of NaN values in our data:. We can use the is.