[R] lists within a list / data-structure problem

[Berton Gunter]

Jan:

One thing to keep in mind: A list is vector. So vector-type operations like
c(), "[", etc. work on lists, too (but be careful). Some comments inline
below that I hope will be helpful. A good reference on the S language is
V&R's S PROGRAMMING, which I recommend highly.

-- Bert Gunter
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
South San Francisco, CA
 
"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."  - George E. P. Box
 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Jan Wantia
> Sent: Monday, December 13, 2004 8:00 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] lists within a list / data-structure problem
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> this is a rather basic question; i am not sure how to 
> structure my data
> well:
> I want to extraxt various measures from my raw-data. These 
> measures are
> of different sizes, so I decided to store them in a list, like:
> 
> run1 <- list(Dom = (my_vector), mean = (my_single_number))
> 
> I can do that in a for loop for 40 runs, ending up with 40 
> lists: run1,
> run2, ..., run40.
> To have all the measurements neatly together I thought of 
> making another
> list, containing  40 sub-lists:
> 

As you found, this is clumsy. The usual way to do this is to put the results
into a *single* list as follows:

## Contruct the empty list with 40 components:
out<-vector("list", 40)
### loop 
... ## do the calculations
out[[i]] <- list(Dom = yourvec,mean=yournumb)
...

>  > ALL <- list(run1, run2,..., run40)
>  > ALL
> [[1]]
> [[1]]$Dom
> [1] "my_vector"
> 
> [[1]]$mean
> [1] "my_single_number"
> 
> 
> [[2]]
> [[2]]$Dom
> [1] "my_vector"
> 
> [[2]]$mean
> [1] "my_single_number"
> 
> ...
> 
> 1) This may be a bit clumsy as I have to type all the sub-list's names
> in by hand in order to produce my ALL-list: Is there a better way?
> 
> 2) I have problems of addressing the data now. I can easily access any
> single value; for example, for the second component of the 
> second sub- list:

out[[i]] is the ith component of the list, i.e. the ith 2 component list
containing the result of the ith loop. So out[[i]][[1]] is yourvec for the
ith loop and out[[i]][[2]] is yournumb. These can be abbreciated as
out[[c(i,1]] and out[[c(i,2)]]

> 
>  > ALL[[2]][[2]]
> [1] "my_single_number",
> 
> but: how could I get the second component of all sub-lists, 
> to plot, for
> example, all the $mean in one plot? For a matrix, mat[,2] 
> would give me
> the whole second column, but
> ALL[[]][[2]]
> does not return all the second components.
> 
> I feel that 'lapply' might help me here, but I could not figure out
> exactly how to use it, and it always comes down to the 
> problem of how to
> correctly address the components in the sublists.
> 
> Or is there maybe a smarter way to do that instead of using a 
> list of lists?
> 
> Any hint would be warmly appreciated!
> 
> Jan
> (R 2.0.1 on windows XP)
> 
> -- 
> 
> ______________________________________________________
> 
> Jan Wantia
> Deptartment of Informatics, University of Zurich
> Andreasstr. 15
> CH 8050 Zurich
> Switzerland
> 
> Tel.:    +41 (0) 1 635 4315
> Fax:     +41 (0) 1 635 45 07
> email: wantia at ifi.unizh.ch
> 
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