how to make groups of variables from a data frame in R? - r

Question

Dear Friends I would appreciate if someone can help me in some question in R.
I have a data frame with 8 variables, lets say (v1,v2,...,v8).I would like to produce groups of datasets based on all possible combinations of these variables. that is, with a set of 8 variables I am able to produce 2^8-1=63 subsets of variables like {v1},{v2},...,{v8}, {v1,v2},....,{v1,v2,v3},....,{v1,v2,...,v8}
my goal is to produce specific statistic based on these groupings and then compare which subset produces a better statistic. my problem is how can I produce these combinations.
thanks in advance

Answer 1

You need the function combn. It creates all the combinations of a vector that you provide it. For instance, in your example:
names(yourdataframe) <- c("V1","V2","V3","V4","V5","V6","V7","V8")
varnames <- names(yourdataframe)
combn(x = varnames,m = 3)
This gives you all permutations of V1-V8 taken 3 at a time.

Answer 2

I'll use data.table instead of data.frame;
I'll include an extraneous variable for robustness.
This will get you your subsetted data frames:
nn<-8L
dt<-setnames(as.data.table(cbind(1:100,matrix(rnorm(100*nn),ncol=nn))),
c("id",paste0("V",1:nn)))
#should be a smarter (read: more easily generalized) way to produce this,
# but it's eluding me for now...
#basically, this generates the indices to include when subsetting
x<-cbind(rep(c(0,1),each=128),
rep(rep(c(0,1),each=64),2),
rep(rep(c(0,1),each=32),4),
rep(rep(c(0,1),each=16),8),
rep(rep(c(0,1),each=8),16),
rep(rep(c(0,1),each=4),32),
rep(rep(c(0,1),each=2),64),
rep(c(0,1),128)) *
t(matrix(rep(1:nn),2^nn,nrow=nn))
#now get the correct column names for each subset
# by subscripting the nonzero elements
incl<-lapply(1:(2^nn),function(y){paste0("V",1:nn)[x[y,][x[y,]!=0]]})
#now subset the data.table for each subset
ans<-lapply(1:(2^nn),function(y){dt[,incl[[y]],with=F]})
You said you wanted some statistics from each subset, in which case it may be more useful to instead specify the last line as:
ans2<-lapply(1:(2^nn),function(y){unlist(dt[,incl[[y]],with=F])})
#exclude the first row, which is null
means<-lapply(2:(2^nn),function(y){mean(ans2[[y]])})