CODEWITHSUNDEEP
juliamissing-data
Richard
Richard

Reputation: 189

Julia: Finding values larger than 0 in vector with missing

I'm fairly new to Julia and as a Matlab/R User I find it, for the most part, really nice to work with.

However, I'm a little confused by the missing values and how to work with them.

Let's say I have a vector:

a=[missing -1 2 3 -12] #Julia
a=[NaN -1 2 3 -12] #Matlab

In Matlab I would just do the following to find the values below 0

a(a<0)

which gives me

-1 -12

The same unfortunately doesn't work in Julia and when I try

a[a.<0]

in Julia I just get the following error

ERROR: ArgumentError: unable to check bounds for indices of type Missing

I also tried the following 

a[findall(skipmissing(a).<0)]

which gives me 

missing
3

since, of course, I skipped the missing value in the findall-function. I'm pretty sure there is an easy and logical way to do this, but I don't seem to be able to find it.

Can someone please show me the way?

Best, Richard

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2731

Answers (1)

Bogumił Kamiński
Bogumił Kamiński

Reputation: 69949

Here is the simplest way to do it:

julia> a=[missing -1 2 3 -12]
1×5 Array{Union{Missing, Int64},2}:
 missing  -1  2  3  -12

julia> a[isless.(a, 0)]
2-element Array{Union{Missing, Int64},1}:
  -1
 -12

This uses the fact that missing is considered larger than any number by isless.

Another way to write it:

julia> filter(x -> isless(x, 0), a)
2-element Array{Union{Missing, Int64},1}:
  -1
 -12

Now in order to avoid this special trick with isless you can do the following (using coalesce is a general approach that can be used for safe handling of missing values):

julia> a[coalesce.(a .< 0, false)]
2-element Array{Union{Missing, Int64},1}:
  -1
 -12

or

julia> filter(x -> coalesce(x < 0, false), a)
2-element Array{Union{Missing, Int64},1}:
  -1
 -12

finally you can be more explicit like:

julia> filter(x -> !ismissing(x) && x < 0, a)
2-element Array{Union{Missing, Int64},1}:
  -1
 -12

or

julia> [v for v in a if !ismissing(v) && v < 0]
2-element Array{Int64,1}:
  -1
 -12

(you could use comprehension syntax also in the examples above)

Upvotes: 7

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