How to perform clustering without removing rows where NA is present in R

Question

I have a data which contain some NA value in their elements. What I want to do is to perform clustering without removing rows where the NA is present.

Answer 1

Using as.numeric may help in this case, but I do think that the original question points to a bug in the daisy function. Specifically, it has the following code:

    if (any(ina <- is.na(type3))) 
    stop(gettextf("invalid type %s for column numbers %s", 
        type2[ina], pColl(which(is.na))))

The intended error message is not printed, because which(is.na) is wrong. It should be which(ina).

I guess I should find out where / how to submit this bug now.

Answer 2

The error is due to the presence of non-numeric variables in the data (numbers encoded as strings). You can convert them to numbers:

mydata <- apply( mtcars, 2, as.numeric )
d <- distfunc(mydata)