Correlate is incorrect with numeric vectors as x,y

[antoine-sachet]

Problem

correlate does not work at all when x and y are numeric vectors.

I am assuming it should work because the doc for correlate says:

x	a numeric vector, matrix or data frame.
y	NULL (default) or a vector, matrix or data frame with compatible dimensions to x. The default is equivalent to y = x (but more efficient).

However, I realise more and more that the whole package pretty much assumes x is a data.frame. Maybe the doc should be updated to reflect that x should be a data.frame and remove the now useless y argument? It is ok if correlate only works with data.frames and is not a drop-in replacement for cor in all situations. It would be much clearer IMO.

Reproducible example

A simple correlation between 2 vectors returns a 1x1 correlation matrix, with a single element which happens to be diagonal.
The correlation will take the value of the diagonal argument.

You won't be able to reproduce yet due to #119 (which I fixed in my fork) but you get the gist:

corrr::correlate(x = 1:10, y = 10:1, quiet = T)
#> # A tibble: 1 x 2
#>   rowname     x
#>   <chr>   <dbl>
#> 1 x          NA
corrr::correlate(x = 1:10, y = 10:1, diagonal = 0.66, quiet = T)
#> # A tibble: 1 x 2
#>   rowname     x
#>   <chr>   <dbl>
#> 1 x        0.66

^{Created on 2020-10-28 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[thisisdaryn]

However, I realise more and more that the whole package pretty much assumes x is a data.frame. Maybe the doc should be updated to reflect that x should be a data.frame and remove the now useless y argument? It is ok if correlate only works with data.frames and is not a drop-in replacement for cor in all situations. It would be much clearer IMO.

Yes, this is something that needs to be resolved. I will submit a PR when there is a decision.

The original package author commented here on the usage of the y argument in response to a previous issue. As is pointed out there, removing y would be a breaking change.

I agree that the use of y was not among the common expected use cases and, additionally, is seemingly very rarely used.

[github-actions]

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