Default method not implemented for type 'list', is there anything I can do?

I have a dataset with over 200,000 rows and when I did summary(df), I noticed that it has Inf, in it. However, when I tried to check using any(is.na(Data) | is.infinite(Data)) I got this error

Error in is.infinite(Data) : 
default method not implemented for type 'list'

I then tried to replace the Inf with NA, yet I got the same error.

>Data[is.infinite(Data)] <- NA
Error in is.infinite(Data) : 
default method not implemented for type 'list'

Please is there something I am not doing right?

>Solution :

Under the hood, a data frame is a special type of list, and as the message says, is.infinite can’t be used on lists. Let’s use this example:

Data <- data.frame(a = c(1, 2, Inf), b = c(-Inf, 3, 4))

Data
#>     a    b
#> 1   1 -Inf
#> 2   2    3
#> 3 Inf    4

is.infinite(Data)
#> Error in is.infinite(Data): default method not implemented for type 'list'

We instead need to apply your NA replacement to each column in the data frame. We can do this quickly using

Data[] <- lapply(Data, function(x) replace(x, is.infinite(x), NA))

Data
#>    a  b
#> 1  1 NA
#> 2  2  3
#> 3 NA  4

An alternative that requires a bit less code would be to convert your data frame to a matrix on the fly to get the replacement indices which are applied to the data frame itself for subsetting.

Data <- data.frame(a = c(1, 2, Inf), b = c(-Inf, 3, 4))

replace(Data, is.infinite(as.matrix(Data)), NA)
#>    a  b
#> 1  1 NA
#> 2  2  3
#> 3 NA  4

^{Created on 2023-02-16 with reprex v2.0.2}