Subsetting R array: dimension lost when its length is 1 - r

When subsetting arrays, R behaves differently depending on whether one of the dimensions is of length 1 or not. If a dimension has length 1, that dimension is lost during subsetting:
ax <- array(1:24, c(2,3,4))
ay <- array(1:12, c(1,3,4))
dim(ax)
#[1] 2 3 4
dim(ay)
#[1] 1 3 4
dim(ax[,1:2,])
#[1] 2 2 4
dim(ay[,1:2,])
#[1] 2 4
From my point of view, ax and ay are the same, and performing the same subset operation on them should return an array with the same dimensions. I can see that the way that R is handling the two cases might be useful, but it's undesirable in the code that I'm writing. It means that when I pass a subsetted array to another function, the function will get an array that's missing a dimension, if I happened to reduce a dimension to length 1 at an earlier stage. (So in this case R's flexibility is making my code less flexible!)
How can I prevent R from losing a dimension of length 1 during subsetting? Is there another way of indexing? Some flag to set?

As you've found out by default R drops unnecessary dimensions. Adding drop=FALSE while indexing can prevent this:
> dim(ay[,1:2,])
[1] 2 4
> dim(ax[,1:2,])
[1] 2 2 4
> dim(ay[,1:2,,drop = F])
[1] 1 2 4

Related

Looping through items on a list in R

this may be a simple question but I'm fairly new to R.
What I want to do is to perform some kind of addition on the indexes of a list, but once I get to a maximum value it goes back to the first value in that list and start over from there.
for example:
x <-2
data <- c(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11)
data[x]
1
data[x+12]
1
data[x+13]
3
or something functionaly equivalent. In the end i want to be able to do something like
v=6
x=8
y=9
z=12
values <- c(v,x,y,z)
data <- c(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11)
set <- c(data[values[1]],data[values[2]], data[values[3]],data[values[4]])
set
5 7 8 11
values <- values + 8
set
1 3 4 7
I've tried some stuff with additon and substraction to the lenght of my list but it does not work well on the lower numbers.
I hope this was a clear enough explanation,
thanks in advance!
We don't need a loop here as vectors can take vectors of length >= 1 as index
data[values]
#[1] 5 7 8 11
NOTE: Both the objects are vectors and not list
If we need to reset the index
values <- values + 8
ifelse(values > length(data), values - length(data) - 1, values)
#[1] 1 3 4 7

using seq_along() to handle the empty case

I read that using seq_along() allows to handle the empty case much better, but this concept is not so clear in my mind.
For example, I have this data frame:
df
a b c d
1 1.2767671 0.133558438 1.5582137 0.6049921
2 -1.2133819 -0.595845408 -0.9492494 -0.9633872
3 0.4512179 0.425949910 0.1529301 -0.3012190
4 1.4945791 0.211932487 -1.2051334 0.1218442
5 2.0102918 0.135363711 0.2808456 1.1293810
6 1.0827021 0.290615747 2.5339719 -0.3265962
7 -0.1107592 -2.762735937 -0.2428827 -0.3340126
8 0.3439831 0.323193841 0.9623515 -0.1099747
9 0.3794022 -1.306189542 0.6185657 0.5889456
10 1.2966537 -0.004927108 -1.3796625 -1.1577800
Considering these three different code snippets:
# Case 1
for (i in 1:ncol(df)) {
print(median(df[[i]]))
}
# Case 2
for (i in seq_along(df)) {
print(median(df[[i]]))
}
# Case 3
for(i in df) print(median(i))
What is the difference between these different procedures when a full data.frame exists or in the presence of an empty data.frame?
Under the condition that df <- data.frame(), we have:
Case 1 falling victim to...
Error in .subset2(x, i, exact = exact) : subscript out of bounds
while Case 2 and 3 are not triggered.
In essence, the error in Case 1 is due to ncol(df) being 0. This leads the sequence 1:ncol(df) to be 1:0, which creates the vector c(1,0). In this case, the for loop tries to access the first element of the vector 1, which tries to access column 1 does not exist. Hence, the subset is found to be out of bounds.
Meanwhile, in Case 2 and 3 the for loop is never executed since there are no elements to process within their respective collections since the vectors are empty. Principally, this means that they have length of 0.
As this question specifically relates to what the heck is happening to seq_along(), let's take a traditional seq_along example by constructing a full vector a and seeing the results:
set.seed(111)
a <- runif(5)
seq_along(a)
#[1] 1 2 3 4 5
In essence, for each element of the vector a, there is a corresponding index that was created by seq_along to be accessed.
If we apply seq_along now to the empty df in the above case, we get:
seq_along(df)
# integer(0)
Thus, what was created was a zero length vector. Its mighty hard to move along a zero length vector.
Ergo, the Case 1 poorly protects the against the empty case.
Now, under the traditional assumption, that is there is some data within the data.frame, which is a very bad assumption for any kind of developer to make...
set.seed(1234)
df <- data.frame(matrix(rnorm(40), 4))
All three cases would be operating as expected. That is, you would receive a median per column of the data.frame.
[1] -0.5555419
[1] -0.4941011
[1] -0.4656169
[1] -0.605349

R: Index to unique vector that returns original

I have a vector v <- c(6,8,5,5,8) of which I can obtain the unique values using
> u <- unique(v)
> u
[1] 6 8 5
Now I need an index i = [2,3,1,1,3] that returns the original vector v when indexed into u.
> u[i]
[1] 6,8,5,5,8
I know such an index can be generated automatically in Matlab, the ci index, but does not seem to be part of the standard repertoire in R. Is anyone aware of a function that can do this?
The background is that I have several vectors with anonymized IDs that are long character strings:
ids
"PTefkd43fmkl28en==3rnl4"
"cmdREW3rFDS32fDSdd;32FF"
"PTefkd43fmkl28en==3rnl4"
"PTefkd43fmkl28en==3rnl4"
"cmdREW3rFDS32fDSdd;32FF"
To reduce the file size and simplify the code, I want to transform them into integers of the sort
ids
1
2
1
1
2
and found that the index of the unique vector does just this. Since there are many rows, I am hesitant to write a function that loops over each element of the unique vector and wonder whether there is a more efficient way — or a completely different way to transform the character strings into matching integers.
Try with match
df1$ids <- with(df1, match(ids, unique(ids)) )
df1$ids
#[1] 1 2 1 1 2
Or we can convert to factor and coerce to numeric
with(df1,as.integer(factor(ids, levels=unique(ids))))
#[1] 1 2 1 1 2
Using u and v. Based on the output of 'u' in the OP's post, it must have been sorted
u <- sort(unique(v))
match(v, u)
#[1] 2 3 1 1 3
Or using findInterval. Make sure that 'u' is sorted.
findInterval(v,u)
#[1] 2 3 1 1 3

Create vector by given distibution of values

Let's say I have a vector a = (1,3,4).
I want to create new vector with integer numbers in range [1,length(a)]. But the i-th number should appear a[i] times.
For the vector a I want to get:
(1,2,2,2,3,3,3,3)
Would you explain me how to implement this operation without several messy concatenations?
You can try rep
rep(seq_along(a), a)
#[1] 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 3
data
a <- c(1,3,4)

Applying a function on each row of a data frame in R

I would like to apply some function on each row of a dataframe in R.
The function can return a single-row dataframe or nothing (I guess 'return ()' return nothing?).
I would like to apply this function on each of the rows of a given dataframe, and get the resulting dataframe (which is possibly shorter, i.e. has less rows, than the original one).
For example, if the original dataframe is something like:
id size name
1 100 dave
2 200 sarah
3 50 ben
And the function I'm using gets a row n the dataframe (i.e. a single-row dataframe), returns it as-is if the name rhymes with "brave", otherwise returns null, then the result should be:
id size name
1 100 dave
This example actually refers to filtering a dataframe, and I would love to get both an answer specific to this kind of task but also to a more general case when even the result of the helper function (the one that operates on a single row) may be an arbitrary data frame with a single row. Please note than even in the case of filtering, I would like to use some sophisticated logic (not something simple like $size>100, but a more complex condition that is checked by a function, let's say boo(single_row_df).
P.s.
What I have done so far in these cases is to use apply(df, MARGIN=1) then do.call(rbind ...) but I think it give me some trouble when my dataframe only has a single row (I get Error in do.call(rbind, filterd) : second argument must be a list)
UPDATE
Following Stephen reply I did the following:
ranges.filter <- function(ranges,boo) {
subset(x=ranges,subset=!any(boo[start:end]))
}
I then call ranges.filter with some ranges dataframe that looks like this:
start end
100 200
250 400
698 1520
1988 2147
...
and some boolean vector
(TRUE,FALSE,TRUE,TRUE,TRUE,...)
I want to filter out any ranges that contain a TRUE value from the boolean vector. For example, the first range 100 .. 200 will be left in the data frame iff the boolean vector is FALSE in positions 100 .. 200.
This seems to do the work, but I get a warning saying numerical expression has 53 elements: only the first used.
For the more general case of processing a dataframe, get the plyr package from CRAN and look at the ddply function, for example.
install.packages(plyr)
library(plyr)
help(ddply)
Does what you want without masses of fiddling.
For example...
> d
x y z xx
1 1 0.68434946 0.643786918 8
2 2 0.64429292 0.231382912 5
3 3 0.15106083 0.307459540 3
4 4 0.65725669 0.553340712 5
5 5 0.02981373 0.736611949 4
6 6 0.83895251 0.845043443 4
7 7 0.22788855 0.606439470 4
8 8 0.88663285 0.048965094 9
9 9 0.44768780 0.009275935 9
10 10 0.23954606 0.356021488 4
We want to compute the mean and sd of x within groups defined by "xx":
> ddply(d,"xx",function(r){data.frame(mean=mean(r$x),sd=sd(r$x))})
xx mean sd
1 3 3.0 NA
2 4 7.0 2.1602469
3 5 3.0 1.4142136
4 8 1.0 NA
5 9 8.5 0.7071068
And it gracefully handles all the nasty edge cases that sometimes catch you out.
You may have to use lapply instead of apply to force the result to be a list.
> rhymesWithBrave <- function(x) substring(x,nchar(x)-2) =="ave"
> do.call(rbind,lapply(1:nrow(dfr),function(i,dfr)
+ if(rhymesWithBrave(dfr[i,"name"])) dfr[i,] else NULL,
+ dfr))
id size name
1 1 100 dave
But in this case, subset would be more appropriate:
> subset(dfr,rhymesWithBrave(name))
id size name
1 1 100 dave
If you want to perform additional transformations before returning the result, you can go back to the lapply approach above:
> add100tosize <- function(x) within(x,size <- size+100)
> do.call(rbind,lapply(1:nrow(dfr),function(i,dfr)
+ if(rhymesWithBrave(dfr[i,"name"])) add100tosize(dfr[i,])
+ else NULL,dfr))
id size name
1 1 200 dave
Or, in this simple case, apply the function to the output of subset.
> add100tosize(subset(dfr,rhymesWithBrave(name)))
id size name
1 1 200 dave
UPDATE:
To select rows that do not fall between start and end, you might construct a different function (note: when summing result of boolean/logical vectors, TRUE values are converted to 1s and FALSE values are converted to 0s)
test <- function(x)
rowSums(mapply(function(start,end,x) x >= start & x <= end,
start=c(100,250,698,1988),
end=c(200,400,1520,2147))) == 0
subset(dfr,test(size))
It sounds like you want to use subset:
subset(orig.df,grepl("ave",name))
The second argument evaluates to a logical expression that determines which rows are kept. You can make this expression use values from as many columns as you want, eg grepl("ave",name) & size>50

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