[R] Sampling from a population

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Andrew Criswell wrote:

> Hi ALL:
>
> Suppose you have a population of N <- 5 observations, x <- c(43, 28, 7, 61, 39). From that you can draw a maximum of 10 samples without replacement of size n <- 3. (Command choose(N,n) yields 10). For instance the samples I seek are
>
>     43, 61, 7
>     39, 7, 28  ...etc
>
> How can I get R to do that for me, to get an exhaustive list of samples of size n drawn without replacement from a population of size N?  The command, sample(x, 3, replace=FALSE), works well for one draw. Is there a package that will handle multiple draws?

This is a question about drawing subsets, as covered in the Programmer's
Niche articles in Rnews.  You want all subsets (not subvectors, as order
does not matter) of size n=3 from N=5 items.

There is some C code to so it in package lqs, where it is used for
exhaustive searching, but that doesn't currently have an R interface (it
did once).

-- 
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

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._