perform function on pairs of columns - r

Question

I am trying to run some Monte Carlo simulations on animal position data. So far, I have sampled 100 X and Y coordinates, 100 times. This results in a list of 200. I then convert this list into a dataframe that is more condusive to eventual functions I want to run for each sample (kernel.area).
Now I have a data frame with 200 columns, and I would like to perform the kernel.area function using each successive pair of columns.
I can't reproduce my own data here very well, so I've tried to give a basic example just to show the structure of the data frame I'm working with. I've included the for loop I've tried so far, but I am still an R novice and would appreciate any suggestions.
# generate dataframe representing X and Y positions
df <- data.frame(x=seq(1:200),y=seq(1:200))
# 100 replications of sampling 100 "positions"
resamp <- replicate(100,df[sample(nrow(df),100),])
# convert to data frame (kernel.area needs an xy dataframe)
df2 <- do.call("rbind", resamp[1:2,])
# xy positions need to be in columns for kernel.area
df3 <- t(df2)
#edit: kernel.area requires you have an id field, but I am only dealing with one individual, so I'll construct a fake one of the same length as the positions
id=replicate(100,c("id"))
id=data.frame(id)
Here is the structure of the for loop I've tried (edited since first post):
for (j in seq(1,ncol(df3)-1,2)) {
kud <- kernel.area(df3[,j:(j+1)],id=id,kern="bivnorm",unin=c("m"),unout=c("km2"))
print(kud)
}
My end goal is to calculate kernel.area for each resampling event (ie rows 1:100 for every pair of columns up to 200), and be able to combine the results in a dataframe. However, after running the loop, I get this error message:
Error in df[, 1] : incorrect number of dimensions
Edit: I realised my id format was not the same as my data frame, so I change it and now have the error:
Error in kernelUD(xy, id, h, grid, same4all, hlim, kern, extent) :
id should have the same length as xy

Answer 1

First, a disclaimer: I have never worked with the package adehabitat, which has a function kernel.area, which I assume you are using. Perhaps you could confirm which package contains the function in question.
I think there are a couple suggestions I can make that are independent of knowledge of the specific package, though.
The first lies in the creation of df3. This should probably be
df3 <- t(df2), but this is most likely correct in your actual code
and just a typo in your post.
The second suggestion has to do with the way you subset df3 in the
loop. j:j+1 is just a single number, since the : has a higher
precedence than + (see ?Syntax for the order in which
mathematical operations are conducted in R). To get the desired two
columns, use j:(j+1) instead.
EDIT:
When loading adehabitat, I was warned to "Be careful" and use the related new packages, among which is adehabitatHR, which also contains a function kernel.area. This function has slightly different syntax and behavior, but perhaps it would be worthwhile examining. Using adehabitatHR (I had to install from source since the package is not available for R 2.15.0), I was able to do the following.
library(adehabitatHR)
for (j in seq(1,ncol(df3)-1,2)) {
kud <-kernelUD(SpatialPoints(df3[,j:(j+1)]),kern="bivnorm")
kernAr<-kernel.area(kud,unin=c("m"),unout=c("km2"))
print(kernAr)
}
detach(package:adehabitatHR, unload=TRUE)
This prints something, and as is mentioned in a comment below, kernelUD() is called before kernel.area().