[R] List of lists? Data frames? (Or other data structures?)

[Roger Peng]

If you're talking about rows and columns, it seems like the appropriate
data structure for you is the data frame.  I think your list of lists
representation might get unwieldy after a while.  I can't really think of
why a data frame would be any slower than a list of lists -- I've never
experienced such behavior.

read.table() may be a little slower than scan() because read.table() reads
in an entire file and then converts each of the columns into an
appropriate data class.  So there is some post-processing going on.  It
doesn't have anything to do with data frames vs. lists.

-roger
_______________________________
UCLA Department of Statistics
http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~rpeng

On Thu, 1 May 2003, R A F wrote:

> Hi, I'm faced with the following problem and would appreciate some
> advice.
> 
> I could have a data frame x that looks like this:
>          aa          bb
> a        1           "A"
> b        2           "B"
> 
> The advantage of this is that I could access all the individual
> components easily.  Also I could access all the rows and columns
> easily.
> 
> Alternatively, I could have a list of lists that looks like this:
> 
> xprime <- list()
> xprime$a <- list()
> xprime$b <- list()
> 
> xprime$a$aa <- 1
> xprime$a$bb <- "A"
> 
> xprime$b$aa <- 2
> xprime$b$bb <- "B"
> 
> etc.
> 
> If speed is important, would a list of lists be faster than a data
> frame? (I know, for example, that scan is supposed to be faster than
> read.table, but I don't know if that is related to issues with data
> frames.)
> 
> My problem with a list of lists, though, is that if I want to access
> all the bb subcomponents, a naive method like this one failed:
> 
> y <- c( "a", "b" )
> xprime[[ y ]]$bb (Does not work)
> 
> So to get all the bb subcomponents I seem to need to loop, which may
> slow things down (presumably).  But maybe people here know of a way.
> 
> Finally what would be the "best" way given the constraint of quick
> access to all rows, columns and individual components?
> 
> I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments.  Thanks very much.
> 
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