Sorry if this is a duplicate, I read through a number of threads but couldn't really find a good explanation.
I have a dataset (dataframe) where I calculated the mean value of each column. I now want to do some logical comparisons between these values. I used lapply to get the means
means_list <- lapply(dataset_df, mean)
which outputs a named list. But when I try to compare two elements of this list, e.g.
means_list["condition1"] > means_list["condition2"]
I get an error ("comparison of these types is not implemented").
I don't get that error if I use sapply instead so that I'm working with a named vector. I can also get around the error by converting the list to a dataframe with as.data.frame first.
So, I feel like I'm doing something wrong when subsetting a named list here but I don't quite understand how. Is there a correct way to subset the list so that I can do the logical comparison? Or is this not possible with named lists?
Thanks!
To access to the element of a list by its name, you have to use double brackets:
means_list[["condition1"]] > means_list[["condition2"]]
Related
I want to learn how to access data from a nested list in R. I am relatively new to the R programming language, so I am unsure how to proceed.
The data is a 'large list(947 elements, 654.9mb) and takes the form:
The numbers within the datalist refer to station numbers and when I click on one (in Rstudio) it looks like this:
I want to kow how I can access the data within 'doy' for example. I have tried:
data[[1]]
which returns all the data for the first element of the list (site, location, doy,ltm etc). So clearly the number used within the square brackets is interpreted as an index for the list, as opposed to an identifier for the elements/station in the list.
Then I tried:
data$1
but it returned the error:
Error: unexpected numeric constant in "data$1"
Then I tried:
data[data$1==doy]
But was returned this:
Error: unexpected numeric constant in "data[data$1"
So at this point, I realise that it is not construing the number of the station as a category/factor within the list. It's just reading it as a number. So I thought I'd put some quotes around it to see if that changed what happened:
data[data$"1"=="doy"]
This returned
named list()
But when I looked at it in the environment, it was a list of 0.
I looked at some of the similar question here on Stack (like: accessing nested lists in R) and tried:
data[data$"1"=="doy",][[1]]
But just got:
Error in data[data$"1" == "doy", ] : incorrect number of dimensions
How can I access this data? It reminds me of a structure in Matlab, but it doesn't seem to be indexed in a similar fashion in R.
Let's look at some ways to do what you want:
data[[1]]
This returns the first element of the list, which is itself a list. You can use the $ subsetting shorthand, but the name of the first element is nonstandard. R prefers names that start with letters and include only alphanumeric characters, periods and underscores. You can escape this behavior with backticks:
data$`1`
If you want to access one of the elements of list 1 in your list of lists, you need to further subset. To get to doy, which is the third element of 1. You can do that four ways.
data[[1]][[3]]
data$`1`[[3]]
data[[1]]$doy
data$`1`$doy
One way (in addition to what Ben Norris has shown):
our_list[[c("1", "doy")]]
Reproducible example data (please provide next time)
our_list <- list(`1` = list(site = "x", doy = 3))
I'm needing to subset a list which contains an array as well as a factor variable. Essentially if you imagine each component of the array is relative to a single individual which is then associated to a two factor variable (treatment).
list(array=array(rnorm(2,4,1),c(5,5,10)), treatment= rep(c(1,2),5))
Typically when sub-setting multiple components of the array from the first component of the list I would use something like
list$array[,,c(2,4,6)]
this would return the array components in location 2,4 and 6. However, for the factor component of the list this wouldn't work as subsetting is different, what you would need is this:
list$treatment[c(2,4,6)]
Need to subset a list with containing different classes (array and vector) by the same relative number.
You're treating your list of matrices as some kind of 3-dimensional object, but it's not.
Your list$matrices is of itself a list as well, which means you can index at as a list as well, it doesn't matter if it is a list of matrices, numerics, plot-objects, or whatever.
The data you provided as an example can just be indexed at one level, so list$matrices[c(2,4,6)] works fine.
And I don't really get your question about saving the indices in a numeric vector, what's to stop you from this code?
indices <- c(2,4,6)
mysubset <- list(list$matrices[indices], list$treatment[indices])
EDIT, adding new info for edited question:
I see you actually have an 3-D array now. Which is kind of weird, as there is no clear convention of what can be seen as "components". I mean, from your question I understand that list$array[,,n] refers to the n-th individual, but from a pure code-point of view there is no reason why something like list$array[n,,] couldn't refer to that.
Maybe you got the idea from other languages, but this is not really R-ish, your earlier example with a list of matrices made more sense to me. And I think the most logical would have been a data.frame with columns matrix and treatment (which is conceptually close to a list with a vector and a list of matrices, but it's clearer to others what you have).
But anyway, what is your desired output?
If it's just subsetting: with this structure, as there are no constraints on what could have been the content, you just have to tell R exactly what you want. There is no one operator that takes a subset of a vector and the 3rd index of an array at the same time. You're going to have to tell R that you want 3rd index to use for subsetting, and that you want to use the same index for subsetting a vector. Which is basically just the code you already have:
idx <- c(2,4,6)
output <- list(list$array[,,idx], list$treatment[idx])
The way that you use for subsetting multiple matrices actually gives an error since you are giving extra dimension although you already specify which sublist you are in. Hence in order to subset matrices for the given indices you can usemy_list[[1]][indices] or directly my_list$matrices[indices]. It is the same for the case treatement my_list[[2]][indices] or my_list$treatement[indices]
I am an R beginner and I am stuck on this problem. I had a dataframe and by using the split() function I have created a list of dataframes, e.g:
dfList <- split(mtcars, mtcars$cyl)
Now I want to retrieve a column of a specific dataframe, e.g. column 2 from dataframe 1, so something like
dfList[1][2]
What I can do right now is create for loops to get inside the data structure. But I can't find a oneliner to do it, if it exists. How can I do that? Thanks in advance!
I'm putting docendo's comment here to close out the question.
If you want to extract an element from a list (and treat it like a data.frame) rather than subset a list (to create a smaller list), you need to use the [[ ]] syntax. Plus, to get a column by index from a data.frame, you either need to use [[ idx ]] or [, idx ]. These are pretty basic indexing operations that you will probably want to review if you will be programming in R. So your "correct" call is probably
dfList[[1]][[2]]
I have 75 matrices that I want to search through. The matrices are named a1r1, a1r2, a1r3, a1r4, a1r5, a2r1,...a15r5, and I have a list with all 75 of those names in it; each matrix has the same number of rows and columns. Inside some nested for loops, I also have a line of code that, for the first matrix looks like this:
total <- (a1r1[row,i]) + (a1r1[row,j]) + (a1r1[row,k])
(i, j, k, and row are all variables that I am looping over.) I would like to automate this line so that the for loops would fully execute using the first matrix in the list, then fully execute using the second matrix and so on. How can I do this?
(I'm an experienced programmer, but new to R, so I'm willing to be told I shouldn't use a list of the matrix names, etc. I realize too that there's probably a better way in R than for loops, but I was hoping for sort of quick and dirty at my current level of R expertise.)
Thanks in advance for the help.
Here The R way to do this :
lapply(ls(pattern='a[0-9]r[0-9]'),
function(nn) {
x <- get(nn)
sum(x[row,c(i,j,k)])
})
ls will give a list of variable having a certain pattern name
You loop through the resulted list using lapply
get will transform the name to a varaible
use multi indexing with the vectorized sum function
It's not bad practice to build automatically lists of names designating your objects. You can build such lists with paste, rep, and sequences as 0:10, etc. Once you have a list of object names (let's call it mylist), the get function applied on it gives the objects themselves.
Ok, I'm stuck in a dumbness loop. I've read thru the helpful ideas at How to sort a dataframe by column(s)? , but need one more hint. I'd like a function that takes a matrix with an arbitrary number of columns, and sorts by all columns in sequence. E.g., for a matrix foo with N columns,
does the equivalent of foo[order(foo[,1],foo[,2],...foo[,N]),] . I am happy to use a with or by construction, and if necessary define the colnames of my matrix, but I can't figure out how to automate the collection of arguments to order (or to with) .
Or, I should say, I could build the entire bloody string with paste and then call it, but I'm sure there's a more straightforward way.
The most elegant (for certain values of "elegant") way would be to turn it into a data frame, and use do.call:
foo[do.call(order, as.data.frame(foo)), ]
This works because a data frame is just a list of variables with some associated attributes, and can be passed to functions expecting a list.