[R] mean vs sum behavior

[Gavin Simpson]

On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 18:41 +0200, Emmanuel Castella wrote:
> Dear all
> Could someone explain me why
> lapply(split(x,fac),mean)
> returns means per levels of fac for each column of x
> whereas
> lapply(split(x,fac),sum)
> does not return sums per level of fac and columns of x, but adds all 
> columns together?
> Hence, how can I get sum to behave as mean in this instance?
> Thank you very much in advance
> E. Castella

You didn't tell us what x is, but I suspect a data.frame. mean has a
method for class "data.frame", which returns the mean of each column.
Sum doesn't have any methods and hence works by summing all the numbers.

If you want to replicate the mean behaviour with sum, the following
would suffice:

> fac <- gl(4, 50)
> dat <- data.frame(a = rnorm(200), b = rnorm(200), c = rnorm(200))
> sp <- split(dat, fac)

then

> lapply(sp, function(x) sapply(x, sum))

or even quicker and easier:

> lapply(sp, colSums)

HTH

G

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