[R] matrix

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Sun, 23 Apr 2000, gb wrote:

> 
> Is there a reason for the following behaviour?
> 
> > x <- matrix(1:6, ncol = 1)
> > x
>      [,1]
> [1,]    1
> [2,]    2
> [3,]    3
> [4,]    4
> [5,]    5
> [6,]    6
> > is.matrix(x)
> [1] TRUE
> > is.matrix(x[1:2,])
> [1] FALSE

Yes, S-compability!  If you want to subset matrices and always get a matrix
you need x[1:2, , drop=FALSE] (note the two commas). Peversely, S drops   
dimensions on subsetting but not on matrix multiplication (use drop there).

[This *is* well-documented in the S literature.]

 
> The reason for asking is that I have a function which takes a matrix as
> an argument, and in the function I "sweep" columns of subsets of the rows
> of the matrix. This works fine, except when the input matrix has only one
> column. Then I get
> 
> > sweep(cc[2:3, ], 2, cc.mean)
> Error in aperm(array(STATS, dims[perm]), order(perm)) : 
>         perm has incorrect length

Um, that does not have only one column, it is a vector and does not have
any columns.

I notice that sweep in R has aped S, but 1:length(dims) is a common error
for seq(along=dims).  Perhaps x in sweep should be coerced to an array, or
stop with an informative message (as apply does).


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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