creating a dataframe of means of 5 randomly sampled observations - r

Question

I'm currently reading "Practical Statistics for Data Scientists" and following along in R as they demonstrate some code. There is one chunk of code I'm particularly struggling to follow the logic of and was hoping someone could help. The code in question is creating a dataframe with 1000 rows where each observation is the mean of 5 randomly drawn income values from the dataframe loans_income. However, I'm getting confused about the logic of the code as it is fairly complicated with a tapply() function and nested rep() statements.
The code to create the dataframe in question is as follows:
samp_mean_5 <- data.frame(income = tapply(sample(loans_income$income,1000*5),
rep(1:1000,rep(5,1000)),
FUN = mean),
type='mean_of_5')
In particular, I'm confused about the nested rep() statements and the 1000*5 portion of the sample() function. Any help understanding the logic of the code would be greatly appreciated!
For reference, the original dataset loans_income simply has a single column of 50,000 income values.

Answer 1

You have 50,000 loans_income in a single vector. Let's break your code down:
tapply(sample(loans_income$income,1000*5),
rep(1:1000,rep(5,1000)),
FUN = mean)
I will replace 1000 with 10 and income with random numbers, so it's easier to explain. I also set set.seed(1) so the result can be reproduced.
sample(loans_income$income,1000*5)
We 50 random incomes from your vector without replacement. They are (temporarily) put into a vector of length 50, so the output looks like this:
> sample(runif(50000),10*5)
[1] 0.73283101 0.60329970 0.29871173 0.12637654 0.48434952 0.01058067 0.32337850
[8] 0.46873561 0.72334215 0.88515494 0.44036341 0.81386225 0.38118213 0.80978822
[15] 0.38291273 0.79795343 0.23622492 0.21318431 0.59325586 0.78340477 0.25623138
[22] 0.64621658 0.80041393 0.68511759 0.21880083 0.77455662 0.05307712 0.60320912
[29] 0.13191926 0.20816298 0.71600799 0.70328349 0.44408218 0.32696205 0.67845445
[36] 0.64438336 0.13241312 0.86589561 0.01109727 0.52627095 0.39207860 0.54643661
[43] 0.57137320 0.52743012 0.96631114 0.47151170 0.84099503 0.16511902 0.07546454
[50] 0.85970500
rep(1:1000,rep(5,1000))
Now we are creating an indexing vector of length 50:
> rep(1:10,rep(5,10))
[1] 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 6 6 6
[29] 6 6 7 7 7 7 7 8 8 8 8 8 9 9 9 9 9 10 10 10 10 10
Those indices "group" the samples from step 1. So basically this vector tells R that the first 5 entries of your "sample vector" belong together (index 1), the next 5 entries belong together (index 2) and so on.
FUN = mean
Just apply the mean-function on the data.
tapply
So tapply takes the sampled data (sample-part) and groups them by the second argument (the rep()-part) and applies the mean-function on each group.
If you are familiar with data.frames and the dplyr package, take a look at this (only the first 10 rows are displayed):
set.seed(1)
df <- data.frame(income=sample(runif(5000),10*5), index=rep(1:10,rep(5,10)))
income index
1 0.42585569 1
2 0.16931091 1
3 0.48127444 1
4 0.68357403 1
5 0.99374923 1
6 0.53227877 2
7 0.07109499 2
8 0.20754511 2
9 0.35839481 2
10 0.95615917 2
I attached the an index to the random numbers (your income). Now we calculate the mean per group:
df %>%
group_by(index) %>%
summarise(mean=mean(income))
which gives us
# A tibble: 10 x 2
index mean
<int> <dbl>
1 1 0.551
2 2 0.425
3 3 0.827
4 4 0.391
5 5 0.590
6 6 0.373
7 7 0.514
8 8 0.451
9 9 0.566
10 10 0.435
Compare it to
set.seed(1)
tapply(sample(runif(5000),10*5),
rep(1:10,rep(5,10)),
mean)
which yields basically the same result:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0.5507529 0.4250946 0.8273149 0.3905850 0.5902823 0.3730092 0.5143829 0.4512932 0.5658460
10
0.4352546