Table of average score of peer per percentile - r

Question

I'm quite a newbie in R so I was interested in the optimality of my solution. Even if it works it could be (a bit) long and I wanted your advice to see if the "way I solved it" is "the best" and it could help me to learn new techniques and functions in R.
I have a dataset on students identified by their id and I have the school where they are matched and the score they obtained at a specific test (so for short: 3 variables id,match and score).
I need to construct the following table: for students in between two percentiles of score, I need to calculate the average score (between students) of the average score of the students of the school they are matched to (so for each school I take the average score of the students matched to it and then I calculate the average of this average for percentile classes, yes average of a school could appear twice in this calculation). In English it allows me to answer: "A student belonging to the x-th percentile in terms of score will be in average matched to a school with this average quality".
Here is an example in the picture:
So in that case, if I take the median (15) for the split (rather than percentiles) I would like to obtain:
[0,15] : 9.5
(15,24] : 20.25
So for students having a score between 0 and 15 I take the average of the average score of the school they are matched to (note that b average will appears twice but that's ok).
Here how I did it:
match <- c(a,b,a,b,c)
score <- c(18,4,15,8,24)
scoreQuant <- cut(score,quantile(score,probs=seq(0,1,0.1),na.rm=TRUE))
AvgeSchScore <- tapply(score,match,mean,na.rm=TRUE)
AvgScore <- 0
for(i in 1:length(score)) {
AvgScore[i] <- AvgeSchScore[match[i]]
}
results <- tapply(AvgScore,scoreQuant,mean,na.rm = TRUE)
If you have a more direct way of doing it.. Or I think the bad point is 3) using a loop, maybe apply() is better ? But I'm not sure how to use it here (I tried to code my own function but it crashed so I "bruted force it").
Thanks :)

Answer 1

The main fix is to eliminate the for loop with:
AvgScore <- AvgeSchScore[match]
R allows you to subset in ways that you cannot in other languages. The tapply function outputs the names of the factor that you grouped by. We are using those names for match to subset AvgeScore.
data.table
If you would like to try data.table you may see speed improvements.
library(data.table)
match <- c("a","b","a","b","c")
score <- c(18,4,15,8,24)
dt <- data.table(id=1:5, match, score)
scoreQuant <- cut(dt$score,quantile(dt$score,probs=seq(0,1,0.1),na.rm=TRUE))
dt[, AvgeScore := mean(score), match][, mean(AvgeScore), scoreQuant]
# scoreQuant V1
#1: (17.4,19.2] 16.5
#2: NA 6.0
#3: (12.2,15] 16.5
#4: (7.2,9.4] 6.0
#5: (21.6,24] 24.0
It may be faster than base R. If the value in the NA row bothers you, you can delete it after.