Reading series of values in R - r

Question

I have read a series of 332 files like below by storing the data in each file as a data frame in List.
files <- list.files()
data <- list()
for (i in 1:332){
data[[i]] = read.csv(files[[i]])
}
The data has 3 columns with names id, city, town. Now I need to calculate the mean of all values under city corresponding to the id values 1:10 for which I wrote the below code
for(j in 1:10){
req.data <- data[[j]]$city
}
mean(na.omit(req.data))
But it is giving me a wrong value and when I call it in a function its transferring null values. Any help is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Each time you iterate through j = 1:10 you assign data[[j]]$city to the object req.data. In doing so, for steps j = 2:10 you are overwriting the previous version of req.data with the contents of the jth data set. Hence req.data only ever contains at any one time a single city's worth of data and hence you are getting the wrong answer sa you are computing the mean for the last city only, not all 10.
Also note that you could do mean(req.data, na.rm = TRUE) to remove the NAs.
You can do this without an explicit loop at the user R level using lapply(), for example, with dummy data,
set.seed(42)
data <- list(data.frame(city = rnorm(100)),
data.frame(city = rnorm(100)),
data.frame(city = rnorm(100)))
mean(unlist(lapply(data, `[`, "city")), na.rm = TRUE)
which gives
> mean(unlist(lapply(data, `[`, "city")), na.rm = TRUE)
[1] -0.02177902
So in your case, you need:
mean(unlist(lapply(data[1:10], `[`, "city")), na.rm = TRUE)
If you want to write a loop, then perhaps
req.data <- vector("list", length = 3) ## allocate, adjust to length = 10
for (j in 1:3) { ## adjust to 1:10 for your data / Q
req.data[[j]] <- data[[j]]$city ## fill in
}
mean(unlist(req.data), na.rm = TRUE)
> mean(unlist(req.data), na.rm = TRUE)
[1] -0.02177902
is one way. Or alternatively, compute the mean of the individual cities and then average those means
vec <- numeric(length = 3) ## allocate, adjust to length = 10
for (j in 1:3) { ## adjust to 1:10 for your question
vec[j] <- mean(data[[j]]$city, na.rm = TRUE)
}
mean(vec)