R: removing NAs in numerical vectors

Question

I am an R novice and am having some challenges. I am dealing with a large dataframe which I have read from a csv file. My numerical vectors contain NAs which are stopping me from running analyses. How do I get rid of these NAs so I can actually do something with my data?

Answer 1

na.omit(dataFrame)

This is an awesome website that I use for quick R related information: http://www.statmethods.net/input/missingdata.html

Answer 2

• for particular variable: x[!is.na(x)], or na.omit (see apropos("^na\\.") for all available na. functions),
• within function, pass na.rm = TRUE as an argument e.g. sapply(dtf, sd, na.rm = TRUE),
• set global NA action: options(na.action = "na.omit") which is set by default, but many functions don't rely on globally defined NA action (mean for instance), while some do (right now I cannot come up with an example),
• and, of, course, if you have a lot of NA's, you should consider variable imputation, there's a question asked on SO that can be helpful.

Long story short, dealing with NA's is a very broad problem, try to concretize it a bit and give us a concise question. I'm sure that someone of SOers can help you!

Cheers, lad!