[R] as.object: function doesn't exist but I wish it did

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Patrick McKann <pcmckann at gmail.com> wrote:
> I seem to come to this problem alot, and I can find my way out of it with a
> loop, but I wish, and wonder if there is a better way.  Here's an example
> (lmer1-5 are a series of lmer objects):
>
>  bs=data.frame(bic=BIC(lmer1,lmer2,lmer3,lmer4,lmer5)$BIC)
>  rownames(bs)=c('lmer1','lmer2','lmer3','lmer4','lmer5')
>  best=rownames(bs)[bs==min(bs)]
>
>> best
> [1] "lmer5"
>
> This tells me that lmer5 is the model with the lowest BIC.  I want to start
> working with lmer5 as the best model, such as fixef(best) to get the fixed
> effect estimates from lmer5.  I tried best=as.object('lmer5') but of course
> this doesn't work because that is not a real function.
>
> Does anybody see what I'm getting at?  If so, do you know a way to do this
> without a loop or series of if statements?
>

If you are asking how to turn a string into a variable its a FAQ!

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#How-can-I-turn-a-string-into-a-variable_003f


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