How to compare the difference between 2 factors in r - r

Let's say that I have 2 words, Happy and Happiness, and I store them each as a factor. I want to find the difference of those 2 factors, so I will preferably want a function that will spit out yiness, inessy, iness and y in any combination, just iness, or just y.
Let's also consider if the code would work for the 2 phrases:
al,y,a€a%f,a,s$lf,askdʇjg,asfg
and
al,y,a€a%f,a,s$lf,askd/879,876/jg,asfg
both without spaces, notice the only difference is ʇ is replaced for /879,876/.
Many thanks in advance!

Related

Is there anything like numerical variable with labels?

I have a numerical variable with discrete levels, that have a special meaning for me, e.g.
-1 'less than zero'
0 'zero'
1 'more than zero'
I know, that I can convert the variable as factor/ordinal and keep the labels, but then the numerical representation of the variable would be
1 'less than zero'
2 'zero'
3 'more than zero'
which is useless for me. I cannot afford having two copies of the variable, because of memory constraints (it is a very big data.table).
Is there any standard way of adding text labels to certain levels of the numerical (possibly integer) variable, so that I can get a nice looking frequency tables just like if it was a factor, and simultaneously being able to treat it as the source numerical variable with values untouched?
I'm going to say the answer to your questions is "no". There's no standard or built-in way of doing what you want.
Because, as you note, factors have positive non-zero integer codes, and integers can't be denoted by label strings in a vector. Not in a "standard" way anyway.
So you will have to do the labelling yourself, in whatever outputs you want to present, manually.
Any tricks like keeping your data (once) as a factor and subtracting a number to get the negative values you need (presumably for your analysis) will make a copy of that data. Keep the numbers, do the analysis, then do replacement with the results (which I presume are tables and plots and so aren't as big as the data).
R also doesn't have an equivalent to the "enumerated type" of many languages, which is one way this can be done.
You could use a vector. Would that work?
var <- c(-1,0,1)
names(var) <- c("less than zero", "zero", "more than zero")
that would give you
> var
less than zero zero more than zero
-1 0 1
Hope that helps,
Umberto

R: how to divide a vector of values into fixed number of groups, based on smallest distance?

I think I have a rather simple problem but I can't figure out the best approach. I have a vector with 30 different values. Now I need to divide the vector into 10 groups in such a way that the mean within group variance is as small as possible. the size of the groups is not important, it can anything between one and 21.
Example. Let's say I have vector of six values, that I have to split into three groups:
Myvector <- c(0.88,0.79,0.78,0.62,0.60,0.58)
Obviously the solution would be:
Group1 <-c(0.88)
Group2 <-c(0.79,0.78)
Group3 <-c(0.62,0.60,0.58)
Is there a function that gives the same outcome as the example and that I can use for my vector withe 30 values?
Many thanks in advance.
It sounds like you want to do k-means clustering. Something like this would work
kmeans(Myvector,3, algo="Lloyd")
Note that I changed the default algorithm to match your desired output. If you read the ?kmeans help page you will see that there are different algorithms to calculate the different clusters because it's not a trivial computational problem. They might necessarily guarantee optimality.

R - How to completely detach a subset plm.dim from a parent plm.dim object?

I want to be able to completely detach a subset (created by tapply) of a dataframe from its parent dataframe. Basically I want R to forget the existing relation and consider the subset dataframe in its own right.
**Following the proposed solution in the comments, I find it does not work for my data. The reason might be that my real dataset is a plm.dim object with an assigned index. I tried this at home for the example dataset and it worked fine. However, once again in my real data, the problem is not solved.
Here's the output of my actual data (original 37 firms)
sum(tapply(p.data$abs_pb_t,p.data$Rfirm,sum)==0)
[1] 7
s.data <- droplevels(p.data[tapply(p.data$abs_pb_t,p.data$ID,sum)!=0,])
sum(tapply(s.data$abs_pb_t,s.data$Rfirm,sum)==0)
[1] 8
Not only is the problem not solved for some reason I get an extra count of a zero variable while I explicitly ask to only keep the ones that differ from zero
Unfortunately, I cannot recreate the same problem with a simple example. For that example, as said, droplevels() works just fine
A simple reproducible example explains:
library(plm)
dad<-cbind(as.data.frame(matrix(seq(1:40),8,5)),factors = c("q","w","e","r"), year = c("1991","1992", "1993","1994"))
dad<-plm.data(dad,index=c("factors","year"))
kid<-dad[tapply(dad$V5,dad$factors,sum)<=70,]
tapply(kid$V1,kid$factors,mean)
kid<-droplevels(dad[tapply(dad$V5,dad$factors,sum)<=70,])
tapply(kid$V1,kid$factors,mean)
So I create a dad and a kid dataframe based on some tapply condition (I'm sure this extends more generally).
the result of the tapply on the kid is the following
e q r w
7 NA 8 NA
Clearly R has not forgotten the dad and it adds that two factors are NA . In itself not much of a problem but in my real dataset which much more variables and subsetting to do, I'd like a cleaner cut so that it will make searching through the kid(s) easier. In other words, I don't want the initial factors q w e r to be remembered. The desired output would thus be:
e r
7 8
So, can anyone think of a reason why what works perfectly in a small data.frame would work differently in a larger dataframe? for p.data (N = 592, T = 16 and n = 37). I find that when I run 2 identical tapply functions, one on s.data and one on p.data, all values are different. So not only have the zeros not disappeared, literally every sum has changed in the s.data which should not be the case. Maybe that gives a clue as to where I go wrong...
And potentially it could solve the mystery of the factors that refuse to drop as well
Thanks
Simon

Sequence manipulation

I have a matrix that is equivalent to a 96-well plate commonly used in microbiology. In that matrix I randomized 12 treatments each 8 times. I printed a kind of guide in order to follow the patten in the lab easily, and then after measurements I merged the randomized plate to the data.
cipPlate <- c(rep(c(seq(0,50,5),"E"),8)); cipPlate
rcipPlate <- array(sample(cipPlate),dim=c(8,12),dimnames=dimna); rcipPlate
platecCIP <- melt(rcipPlate); platecCIPbbCIP
WellCIP <- paste(platecCIP$Var1,platecSTR$Var2,sep=''); WellCIP
bbCIP <- data.frame(Well=WellCIP,ID=platecCIP$value); bbCIP
That works fine, except that the numbers in the sequence created for this are characters instead of integers. Then when i try to use ggplo2 to plot this with the measurements instead of plotting in the x -axis (o,5,10,15,...,50) it goes (0,10,15,...,45,5,50)
Is there a way to avoid this, or to make the numbers inside these sequence to represent the actual number as an integer instead of a character
BTW: sorry for the clumpsy code, I'm not an expert and it works good enough so that i can use it further.

Different behaviour of intersect on vectors and factors

I try to compare multiple vectors of Entrez IDs (integer vectors) by using Reduce(intersect,...). The vectors are selected from a database using "DISTINCT" so a single vector does not contain duplicates.
length(factor(c(l1$entrez)))
gives the same length (and the same IDs w/o the length function) as
length(c(l1$entrez))
When I compare multiple vectors with
length(Reduce(intersect,list(c(l1$entrez),c(l2$entrez),c(l3$entrez),c(l4$entrez))))
or
length(Reduce(intersect,list(c(factor(l1$entrez)),c(factor(l2$entrez)),c(factor(l3$entrez)),c(factor(l4$entrez)))))
the result is not the same. I know that factor!=originalVector but I cannot understand why the result differs although the length and the levels of the initial factors/vectors are the same.
Could somebody please explain the different behaviour of the intersect function on vectors and factors? Is it that the intersect of two factor lists are again factorlists and then duplicates are treated differently?
Edit - Example:
> head(l1)
entrez
1 1
2 503538
3 29974
4 87769
5 2
6 144568
> head(l2)
entrez
1 1743
2 1188
3 8915
4 7412
5 51082
6 5538
The lists contain around 500 to 20K Entrez IDs. So the vectors contain pure integer and should give the intersect among all tested vectors.
> length(Reduce(intersect,list(c(factor(l1$entrez)),c(factor(l2$entrez)),c(factor(l3$entrez)),c(factor(l4$entrez)))))
[1] 514
> length(Reduce(intersect,list(c(l1$entrez),c(l2$entrez),c(l3$entrez),c(l4$entrez))))
[1] 338
> length(Reduce(intersect,list(l1$entrez,l2$entrez,l3$entrez,l4$entrez)))
[1] 494
I have to apologize profusely. The different behaviour of the intersect function may be caused by a problem with the data. I have found fields in the dataset containing comma seperated Entrez IDs (22038, 23207, ...). I should have had a more detailed look at the data first. Thank you for the answers and your time. Although I do not understand the different results yet, I am sure that this is the cause of the different behaviour. Can somebody confirm that?
As Roman says, an example would be very helpful.
Nevertheless, one possibility is that your variables l1$entrez, l2$entrez etc have the same levels but in different orders.
intersect converts its arguments via as.vector, which turns factors into character variables. This is usually the right thing to do, as it means that varying level order doesn't make any difference to the result.
Passing factor(l1$entrez) as an argument to intersect also removes the impact of varying level order, as it effectively creates a new factor with level ordering set to the default. However, if you pass c(l1$entrez), you strip the factor attributes off your variable and what you're left with is the raw integer codes which will depend on level ordering.
Example:
a <- factor(letters[1:3], levels=letters)
b <- factor(letters[1:3], levels=rev(letters)
# returns 1 2 3
intersect(c(factor(a)), c(factor(b)))
# returns integer(0)
intersect(c(a), c(b))
I don't see any reason why you should use c() in here. Just let R handle factors by itself (although to be fair, there are other scenarios where you do want to step in).

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