[R] Vectorizing a "for" loop
Thomas Lumley
tlumley at u.washington.edu
Thu Aug 3 16:22:39 CEST 2006
On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Daniel Gerlanc wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Consider the following problem:
>
> There are two vectors:
>
> rows <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
> columns <- c(10, 11, 12, 13, 14)
>
> I want to create a matrix with dimensions length(rows) x length(columns):
>
> res <- matrix(nrow = length(rows), ncol = length(columns))
>
> If "i" and "j" are the row and column indexes respectively, the values
> of the cells are abs(rows[i] - columns[j]). The resultant matrix
> follows:
>
> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
> [1,] 9 10 11 12 13
> [2,] 8 9 10 11 12
> [3,] 7 8 9 10 11
> [4,] 6 7 8 9 10
> [5,] 5 6 7 8 9
>
> This matrix may be generated by using a simple "for" loop:
>
> for(i in 1:length(rows)){
> for(j in 1:length(columns)){
> res[i,j] <- abs(rows[i] - columns[j])
> }
> }
>
> Is there a quicker, vector-based approach for doing this or a function
> included in the recommended packages that does this?
>
abs(outer(rows,columns,"-"))
-thomas
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