Remove NA values from a vector

Question

How can I remove NA values from a vector?

I have a huge vector which has a couple of NA values, and I'm trying to find the max value in that vector (the vector is all numbers), but I can't do this because of the NA values.

How can I remove the NA values so that I can compute the max?

Answer 1

You can call max(vector, na.rm = TRUE). More generally, you can use the na.omit() function.

Answer 2

The na.omit function is what a lot of the regression routines use internally:

vec <- 1:1000
vec[runif(200, 1, 1000)] <- NA
max(vec)
#[1] NA
max( na.omit(vec) )
#[1] 1000

Answer 3

Just in case someone new to R wants a simplified answer to the original question

How can I remove NA values from a vector?

Here it is:

Assume you have a vector foo as follows:

foo = c(1:10, NA, 20:30)

running length(foo) gives 22.

nona_foo = foo[!is.na(foo)]

length(nona_foo) is 21, because the NA values have been removed.

Remember is.na(foo) returns a boolean matrix, so indexing foo with the opposite of this value will give you all the elements which are not NA.

Answer 4

?max shows you that there is an extra parameter na.rm that you can set to TRUE.

Apart from that, if you really want to remove the NAs, just use something like:

myvec[!is.na(myvec)]

Answer 5

Trying ?max, you'll see that it actually has a na.rm = argument, set by default to FALSE. (That's the common default for many other R functions, including sum(), mean(), etc.)

Setting na.rm=TRUE does just what you're asking for:

d <- c(1, 100, NA, 10)
max(d, na.rm=TRUE)

If you do want to remove all of the NAs, use this idiom instead:

d <- d[!is.na(d)]

A final note: Other functions (e.g. table(), lm(), and sort()) have NA-related arguments that use different names (and offer different options). So if NA's cause you problems in a function call, it's worth checking for a built-in solution among the function's arguments. I've found there's usually one already there.