[R] ifelse logic and multiple assignments

David Young david.young.spain at gmail.com
Wed Mar 10 17:36:41 CET 2010


I'm a fairly new R user and while I have a solution to my problem I'm
wondering if there is a better one.

In SAS it's common to use if/then logic along with a "do" statement to
make several things happen.  While I could do the same thing in R
using a "for" loop, and "if" and {}, I've read that loops are less
common in R and I wonder if I'm doing things ineffectively.

Below I've used a "ifelse" function to make an assignment to the
variable FUT.direction, but what I'd really like to do is make several
assignments based on the same "ifelse" logic.  Since the "ifelse"
wants to create a vector the same size as the logical condition it
doesn't seem obvious how I'd make several assignments and I worry
about simply re-writing the logic for each assignment for fear of
introducing errors that would be hard to find later.

minitest$FUT.direction <-
  ifelse((minitest$FUT.lm.max.3.20.r2.price == max),
    ifelse((minitest$FUT.lm.max.3.20.slope.price > 0),1, 2),
    ifelse((minitest$FUT.lm.min.3.20.r2.price == max),
      ifelse((minitest$FUT.lm.min.3.20.slope.price > 0),1, 2),
      ifelse((minitest$FUT.lm.max.21.100.r2.avg.price == max),
        ifelse((minitest$FUT.lm.max.21.100.slope.avg.price > 0),3, 4),
        ifelse((minitest$FUT.lm.min.21.100.r2.avg.price == max),
          ifelse((minitest$FUT.lm.min.21.100.slope.avg.price > 0),3, 4),
          ifelse((NA == max),NA,NA)
        )
      )
    )
  )
  
Should I just go ahead with the "for" loop or does someone know of a
better way to use one set of logic (by observation) to make several
assignments?  Thanks in advance for any helpful advice.
  
-- 
Best regards,
 David                          mailto:David.Young.Spain at gmail.com



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