[R] randomForest

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Duncan" == Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
>>>>>     on Thu, 07 Jul 2005 15:44:38 -0400 writes:

    Duncan> On 7/7/2005 3:38 PM, Weiwei Shi wrote:
    >> Hi there:
    >> I have a question on random foresst:
    >> 
    >> recently i helped a friend with her random forest and i came with this problem:
    >> her dataset has 6 classes and since the sample size is pretty small:
    >> 264 and the class distr is like this (Diag is the response variable)

    >> sample.size <- lapply(1:6, function(i) sum(Diag==i))
    >>> sample.size
    >> [[1]]
    >> [1] 36

    ....

and later you get problems because you didn't know that a *list*
such as 'sample.size' should be made into a so called
*atomic vector* {and there's a function  is.atomic(.) ! to test for it}
and Duncan and others told you about unlist().

Now there are two things I'd want to add:

1) If you had used 

      s.size <- table(Diag)

   you had used a faster and simpler expression with the same result.
   Though in general (when there can be zero counts), to give the
   same result, you'd need

      s.size <- table(factor(Diag, levels = 1:6))

   Still a bit preferable to the lapply(.) IMO


2)  You should get into the habit of using
     sapply(.)   rather than  lapply(.).

    sapply() originally was exactly devised for the above task:
    and stands for ``[s]implified lapply''.

    It always returns an ``unlisted'' result when appropriate.

Regards,
Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich