Yes I know why we always round to the nearest even number if we are in the exact middle (i.e. 2.5 becomes 2) of two numbers. But when I want to evaluate data for some people they don't want this behaviour. What is the simplest method to get this:
x <- seq(0.5,9.5,by=1)
round(x)
to be 1,2,3,...,10 and not 0,2,2,4,4,...,10.
Edit: To clearify: 1.4999 should be 1 after rounding. (I thought this would be obvious)
This is not my own function, and unfortunately, I can't find where I got it at the moment (originally found as an anonymous comment at the Statistically Significant blog), but it should help with what you need.
round2 = function(x, n) {
posneg = sign(x)
z = abs(x)*10^n
z = z + 0.5
z = trunc(z)
z = z/10^n
z*posneg
}
x
is the object you want to round, and n
is the number of digits you are rounding to.
An Example
x = c(1.85, 1.54, 1.65, 1.85, 1.84)
round(x, 1)
# [1] 1.8 1.5 1.6 1.8 1.8
round2(x, 1)
# [1] 1.9 1.5 1.7 1.9 1.8
If you want something that behaves exactly like round
except for those xxx.5 values, try this:
x <- seq(0, 1, 0.1)
x
# [1] 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0
floor(0.5 + x)
# [1] 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1
As @CarlWitthoft said in the comments, this is the IEC 60559 standard as mentioned in ?round
:
Note that for rounding off a 5, the IEC 60559 standard is expected to be used, ‘go to the even digit’. Therefore round(0.5) is 0 and round(-1.5) is -2. However, this is dependent on OS services and on representation error (since e.g. 0.15 is not represented exactly, the rounding rule applies to the represented number and not to the printed number, and so round(0.15, 1) could be either 0.1 or 0.2).
An additional explanation by Greg Snow:
The logic behind the round to even rule is that we are trying to
represent an underlying continuous value and if x comes from a truly
continuous distribution, then the probability that x==2.5 is 0 and the
2.5 was probably already rounded once from any values between 2.45 and 2.54999999999999..., if we use the round up on 0.5 rule that we learned in grade school, then the double rounding means that values
between 2.45 and 2.50 will all round to 3 (having been rounded first
to 2.5). This will tend to bias estimates upwards. To remove the
bias we need to either go back to before the rounding to 2.5 (which is
often impossible to impractical), or just round up half the time and
round down half the time (or better would be to round proportional to
how likely we are to see values below or above 2.5 rounded to 2.5, but
that will be close to 50/50 for most underlying distributions). The
stochastic approach would be to have the round function randomly
choose which way to round, but deterministic types are not
comforatable with that, so "round to even" was chosen (round to odd
should work about the same) as a consistent rule that rounds up and
down about 50/50.
If you are dealing with data where 2.5 is likely to represent an exact
value (money for example), then you may do better by multiplying all
values by 10 or 100 and working in integers, then converting back only
for the final printing. Note that 2.50000001 rounds to 3, so if you
keep more digits of accuracy until the final printing, then rounding
will go in the expected direction, or you can add 0.000000001 (or
other small number) to your values just before rounding, but that can
bias your estimates upwards.
This appears to work:
rnd <- function(x) trunc(x+sign(x)*0.5)
Ananda Mahto's response seems to do this and more - I am not sure what the extra code in his response is accounting for; or, in other words, I can't figure out how to break the rnd() function defined above.
Example:
seq(-2, 2, by=0.5)
# [1] -2.0 -1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
round(x)
# [1] -2 -2 -1 0 0 0 1 2 2
rnd(x)
# [1] -2 -2 -1 -1 0 1 1 2 2
Depending on how comfortable you are with jiggling your data, this works:
round(x+10*.Machine$double.eps)
# [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
The best and most simple solution is to add 0.00000001 to the number and then round it.
round(1.15 + 0.00000001, 1) = 1.2