does rlars have to crash when not using 'fallback'?

[firthunands]

Hi there

While trying this mock analysis, 'rlars' crashed

key library

require(robustHD)

fit robust LARS model

require(MASS) # for the dataset
View(birthwt)
rlars(bwt ~., data=birthwt)

Andreas explained to me what 'fallback' does in the case of this data (the data set has dummy variables). The issue is fixed when typed like this 'rlars(bwt ~., data=birthwt, fallback=T)'

However, this doesn't explain why R crashes when the fallback option isn't set

Comments?

Best

Fernando

[aalfons]

It has been a few years, but I never answered here (from what I remember we had a discussion via email).

The problem is that the MAD, which is used for robust standardization, can fail in some circumstances. The fallback option is to use nonrobust standardization. It is in general safer to give an error rather than using nonrobust standardization as a default fallback.

However, there could be an extra check if the MAD failed because of a dummy variable, which are safe to standardize in a nonrobust way.