[R] Random selection from a subsample

[Tom Wilding]

Dear Mailing List

I have a data set (data4) consisting of a number of factors and a response variable.  I wish to randomly sample from a combination of two of those factors (GIS_station and Distance_code2) and return a new dataframe containing the original data structure (i.e. all the columns) but only containing the randomly selected rows.  The number of rows in each combination of GIS_station and Distance_code2 vary (widely) and some combinations are absent.   

This is getting there:: 
with (data4,{
sub_sample10=by(data4,list(GIS_station,Distance_code2), function(x) {sample(1:nrow(x),10,replace=T)})
})

....but just generates two random numbers from the range 1:nrow(x).  It doesn't return the selected rows, which is what I want.

I'm sure I could this could be done in an elegant manner, using a subscript e.g.
 
sub_sample10 = data4 [sample (1:nrow (data4), size=10), ] 

only somehow combining it with the 'by' statement (e.g. by (data4, list (GIS_station, Distance_code2).......)) but I cannot get this to work.  

Any guidance on this much appreciated.

Thankyou.