I basically want to be capable to call columns from inside a for loop (in reality two nested for loops), using past() and i (j..) value of the loop to access
my data frames columns wise in a flexible manner.
#for the showcase I use the standard cars example
r1 <- cars
r2 <- cars
# in case there are more data to consider I would want to add, ore remove further with out changing the rest
# here I am entering the "dimension" of what I want to compare for the showcase its only one
num_r <- 2 #total number of reactors in the experiment
for( i in 1:num_r)
{
# shoud create proxie variable to be processed further
assign(paste("proxi_r",i,sep="", colapse="") , do.call("matrix",
list(get(paste("r",i,"$speed",sep="", colapse="" )))))
# further operations of gluing and arranging data follow so they fit tests formatting requirements
}
which gives me:
Error in get(paste("r", i, "$speed", sep = "", colapse = "")) :
object 'r1$speed' not found
but when typ r1$speed it obviously exists??
Sofare I searched "R object dont exist inside loop", "using paste() to acces variables inside loop", "foor loops and objects","do.call inside loops" ....and similar...
Is there anything to circumvent get() so I don’t have to look into the topic of environments, so I can keep the flexibility of my loops so I don’t have re-edit my script every time I have a changed the experimental configuration, which is really time consuming and allows a lot of errors to sneak inside.
The size of the data have crashed excel with extensive use of excel macros, which everyone in the lab here is using, several times :) , so there is no going back to the convort zone.
I am now trying to dig into R programming with a R statics book, and a lot of googling and reading tutorials, so please forgive my naive approach, and my lousy English.
I would be very thankful for any tips, as I feel sort of stuck right now.
This is a common confusion. You've created an object name "r1$speed" , i.e. a complete character string. This is not the same as the object r1 subsetted by $speed .
Try using get(paste('r',i,collapse='',sep=''))$speed
Related
I just hope to learn how to make a simple statistical summary of the random numbers fra row 1 to 5 in R. (as shown in picture).
And then assign these rows to a single variable.
enter image description here
Hope you can help!
When you type something like 3 on a single line and ask R to "run" it, it doesn't store that anywhere -- it just evaluates it, meaning that it tries to make sense out of whatever you've typed (such as 3, or 2+1, or sqrt(9), all of which would return the same value) and then it more or less evaporates. You can think of your lines 1 through 5 as behaving like you've used a handheld scientific calculator; once you type something like 300 / 100 into such a calculator, it just shows you a 3, and then after you have executed another computation, that 3 is more or less permanently gone.
To do something with your data, you need to do one of two things: either store it into your environment somehow, or to "pipe" your data directly into a useful function.
In your question, you used this script:
1
3
2
7
6
summary()
I don't think it's possible to repair this strategy in the way that you're hoping -- and if it is possible, it's not quite the "right" approach. By typing the numbers on individual lines, you've structured them so that they'll evaluate individually and then evaporate. In order to run the summary() function on those numbers, you will need to bind them together inside a single vector somehow, then feed that vector into summary(). The "store it" approach would be
my_vector <- c(1, 3, 7, 2, 6)
summary(my_vector)
The importance isn't actually the parentheses; it's the function c(), which stands for concatenate, and instructs R to treat those 5 numbers as a collective object (i.e. a vector). We then pass that single object into my_vector().
To use the "piping" approach and avoid having to store something in the environment, you can do this instead (requires R 4.1.0+):
c(1, 3, 7, 2, 6) |> summary()
Note again that the use of c() is required, because we need to bind the five numbers together first. If you have an older version of R, you can get a slightly different pipe operator from the magrittr library instead that will work the same way. The point is that this "binding" part of the process is an essential part that can't be skipped.
Now, the crux of your question: presumably, your data doesn't really look like the example you used. Most likely, it's in some separate .csv file or something like that; if not, hopefully it is easy to get it into that format. Assuming this is true, this means that R will actually be able to do the heavy lifting for you in terms of formatting your data.
As a very simple example, let's say I have a plain text file, my_example.txt, whose contents are
1
3
7
2
6
In this case, I can ask R to parse this file for me. Assuming you're using RStudio, the simplest way to do this is to use the File -> Import Dataset part of the GUI. There are various options dealing with things such as headers, separators, and so forth, but I can't say much meaningful about what you'd need to do there without seeing your actual dataset.
When I import that file, I notice that it does two things in my R console:
my_example <- read.table(...)
View(my_example)
The first line stores an object (called a "data frame" in this case) in my environment; the second shows a nice view of how it's rendered. To get the summary I wanted, I just need to extract the vector of numbers I want, which I see from the view is called V1, which I can do with summary(my_example$V1).
This example is probably not helpful for your actual data set, because there are so many variations on the theme here, but the theme itself is important: point R at a file, as it to render an object, then work with that object. That's the approach I'd recommend instead of typing data as lines within an R script, as it's much faster and less error-prone.
Hopefully this will get you pointed in the right direction in terms of getting your data into R and working with it.
I'm brand new to programming and an picking up Rstudio as a stats tool.
I have a dataset which includes multiple questionnaires divided by weeks, and I'm trying to organize the data into meaningful chunks.
Right now this is what my code looks like:
w1a=table(qwest1,talm1)
w2a=table(qwest2,talm2)
w3a=table(quest3,talm3)
Where quest and talm are the names of the variable and the number denotes the week.
Is there a way to compress all those lines into one line of code so that I could make w1a,w2a,w3a... each their own object with the corresponding questionnaire added in?
Thank you for your help, I'm very new to coding and I don't know the etiquette or all the vocabulary.
This might do what you wanted (but not what you asked for):
tbl_list <- mapply(table, list(qwest1, qwest2, quest3),
list(talm1, talm2, talm3) )
names(tbl_list) <- c('w1a', 'w2a','w3a')
You are committing a fairly typical new-R-user error in creating multiple similarly named and structured objects but not putting them in a list. This is my effort at pushing you in that direction. Could also have been done via:
qwest_lst <- list(qwest1, qwest2, quest3)
talm_lst <- list(talm1, talm2, talm3)
tbl_lst <- mapply(table, qwest_lst, talm_lst)
names(tbl_list) <- paste0('w', 1:3, 'a')
There are other ways to programmatically access objects with character vectors using get or wget.
I'm trying to create a "summary" data frame that holds some high-level stats about a few objects in my R project. I'm having trouble even accomplishing this simple task and I've tried using For loops and Apply functions with no luck.
After searching (a lot) on SO I'm seeing that For loops might not be the best performing option, so I'm open to any solution that gets the job done.
I have three objects: text1 text2 and text3 of class "Large Character (vectors)" (imagine I might be exploring these objects and will create a NLP predictive model from them). Each are > 250 MB in size (upwards of 1 million "rows" each) once loaded into R.
My goal: Store the results of object.size() length() and max(nchar()) in a table for my 3 objects.
Method 1: Use an Apply() Function
Issue: I haven't successfully applied multiple functions to a single object. I understand how to do simple applies like lapply(x, mean) but I'm falling short here.
Method 2: Bind Rows Using a For loop
I'm liking this solution because I almost know how to implement it. A lot of SO users say this is a bad approach, but I'm lacking other ideas.
sources <- c("text1", "text2", "text3")
text.summary <- data.frame()
for (i in sources){
text.summary[i ,] <- rbind(i, object.size(get(i)), length(get(i)),
max(nchar(get(i))))
}
Issue: This returns the error data length exceeds size of matrix - I know I could define the structure of my data frame (on line 2), but I've seen too much feedback on other questions that advise against doing this.
Thanks for helping me understand the proper way to accomplish this. I know I'm going to have trouble doing NLP if I can't even figure out this simple problem, but R is my first foray into programming. Oof!
Just try for example:
do.call(rbind, lapply(list(text1,text2,text3),
function(x) c(objectSize=c(object.size(x)),length=length(x),max=max(nchar(x)))))
You'll obtain a matrix. You can coerce to data.frame later if you need.
I can't find something to the effect of an undo command in R (neither on An Introduction to R nor in R in a Nutshell). I am particularly interested in undoing/deleting when dealing with interactive graphs.
What approaches do you suggest?
You should consider a different approach which leads to reproducible work:
Pick an editor you like and which has R support
Write your code in 'snippets', ie short files for functions, and then use the facilities of the editor / R integration to send the code to the R interpreter
If you make a mistake, re-edit your snippet and run it again
You will always have a log of what you did
All this works tremendously well in ESS which is why many experienced R users like this environment. But editors are a subjective and personal choice; other people like Eclipse with StatET better. There are other solutions for Mac OS X and Windows too, and all this has been discussed countless times before here on SO and on other places like the R lists.
In general I do adopt Dirk's strategy. You should aim for your code to be a completely reproducible record of how you have transformed your raw data into output.
However, if you have complex code it can take a long time to re-run it all. I've had code that takes over 30 minutes to process the data (i.e., import, transform, merge, etc.).
In these cases, a single data-destroying line of code would require me to wait 30 minutes to restore my workspace.
By data destroying code I mean things like:
x <- merge(x, y)
df$x <- df$x^2
e.g., merges, replacing an existing variable with a transformation, removing rows or columns, and so on. In these cases, it's easy, especially when first learning R to make a mistake.
To avoid having to wait this 30 minutes, I adopt several strategies:
If I'm about to do something where there's a risk of destroying my active objects, I'll first copy the result into a temporary object. I'll then check that it worked with the temporary object and then rerun replacing it with the proper object.
E.g., first run temp <- merge(x, y); check that it worked str(temp); head(temp); tail(temp) and if everything looks good x <- merge(x, y)
As is common in psychological research, I often have large data frames with hundreds of variables and different subsets of cases. For a given analysis (e.g., a table, a figure, some results text), I'll often extract just the subset of cases and variables that I need into a separate object for the analysis and work with that object when preparing and finalising my analysis code. That way, I'm less likely to accidentally damage my main data frame. This assumes that the results of the analysis does not need to be fed back into the main data frame.
If I have finished performing a large number of complex data transformations, I may save a copy of the core workspace objects. E.g., save(x, y, z , file = 'backup.Rdata') That way, If I make a mistake, I only have to reload these objects.
df$x <- NULL is a handy way of removing a variable in a data frame that you did not want to create
However, in the end I still run all the code from scratch to check that the result is reproducible.
Many intro R books and guides start off with the practice of attaching a data.frame so that you can call the variables by name. I have always found it favorable to call variables with $ notation or square bracket slicing [,2]. That way I can use multiple data.frames without confusing them and/or use iteration to successively call columns of interest. I noticed Google recently posted coding guidelines for R which included the line
1) attach: avoid using it
How do people feel about this practice?
I never use attach. with and within are your friends.
Example code:
> N <- 3
> df <- data.frame(x1=rnorm(N),x2=runif(N))
> df$y <- with(df,{
x1+x2
})
> df
x1 x2 y
1 -0.8943125 0.24298534 -0.6513271
2 -0.9384312 0.01460008 -0.9238312
3 -0.7159518 0.34618060 -0.3697712
>
> df <- within(df,{
x1.sq <- x1^2
x2.sq <- x2^2
y <- x1.sq+x2.sq
x1 <- x2 <- NULL
})
> df
y x2.sq x1.sq
1 0.8588367 0.0590418774 0.7997948
2 0.8808663 0.0002131623 0.8806532
3 0.6324280 0.1198410071 0.5125870
Edit: hadley mentions transform in the comments. here is some code:
> transform(df, xtot=x1.sq+x2.sq, y=NULL)
x2.sq x1.sq xtot
1 0.41557079 0.021393571 0.43696436
2 0.57716487 0.266325959 0.84349083
3 0.04935442 0.004226069 0.05358049
I much prefer to use with to obtain the equivalent of attach on a single command:
with(someDataFrame, someFunction(...))
This also leads naturally to a form where subset is the first argument:
with(subset(someDataFrame, someVar > someValue),
someFunction(...))
which makes it pretty clear that we operate on a selection of the data. And while many modelling function have both data and subset arguments, the use above is more consistent as it also applies to those functions who do not have data and subset arguments.
The main problem with attach is that it can result in unwanted behaviour. Suppose you have an object with name xyz in your workspace. Now you attach dataframe abc which has a column named xyz. If your code reference to xyz, can you guarantee that is references to the object or the dataframe column? If you don't use attach then it is easy. just xyz refers to the object. abc$xyz refers to the column of the dataframe.
One of the main reasons that attach is used frequently in textbooks is that it shortens the code.
"Attach" is an evil temptation. The only place where it works well is in the classroom setting where one is given a single dataframe and expected to write lines of code to do the analysis on that one dataframe. The user is unlikely to ever use that data again once the assignement is done and handed in.
However, in the real world, more data frames can be added to the collection of data in a particular project. Furthermore one often copies and pastes blocks of code to be used for something similar. Often one is borrowing from something one did a few months ago and cannot remember the nuances of what was being called from where. In these circumstances one gets drowned by the previous use of "attach."
Just like Leoni said, with and within are perfect substitutes for attach, but I wouldn't completely dismiss it. I use it sometimes, when I'm working directly at the R prompt and want to test some commands before writing them on a script. Especially when testing multiple commands, attach can be a more interesting, convenient and even harmless alternative to with and within, since after you run attach, the command prompt is clear for you to write inputs and see outputs.
Just make sure to detach your data after you're done!
I prefer not to use attach(), as it is far too easy to run a batch of code several times each time calling attach(). The data frame is added to the search path each time, extending it unnecessarily. Of course, good programming practice is to also detach() at the end of the block of code, but that is often forgotten.
Instead, I use xxx$y or xxx[,"y"]. It's more transparent.
Another possibility is to use the data argument available in many functions which allows individual variables to be referenced within the data frame. e.g., lm(z ~ y, data=xxx).
While I, too, prefer not to use attach(), it does have its place when you need to persist an object (in this case, a data.frame) through the life of your program when you have several functions using it. Instead of passing the object into every R function that uses it, I think it is more convenient to keep it in one place and call its elements as needed.
That said, I would only use it if I know how much memory I have available and only if I make sure that I detach() this data.frame once it is out of scope.
Am I making sense?