[R] Apply functions along "layers" of a data matrix

[David Winsemius]

On Nov 18, 2011, at 8:05 AM, <saschaview at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello
>
> How can I apply functions along "layers" of a data matrix?
>
> Example:
>
> daf <- data.frame(
>  'id' = rep(1:5, 3),
>  matrix(1:60, nrow=15, dimnames=list( NULL, paste('v', 1:4,  
> sep='') )),
>  rep = rep(1:3, each=5)
> )
>
> The data frame "daf" contains 3 repetitions/layers (rep) of 4  
> variables of 5 persons (id). For some reason, I want to calculate  
> various statistics (e.g., mean, median) *along* the repetitions. The  
> "mean" calculation, for example, would produce the means of daf[1,  
> 'v1'] *along* the 3 repetition:
>
> (daf[1, 'v1'] + daf[6, 'v1'] + daf[11, 'v1']) / 3
>
> That is to say, each of the calculations would result in a data  
> frame with 4 variables (and the id) of the 5 persons:
>
>  id v1 v2 v3 v4
> 1  1  6 21 36 51
> 2  2  7 22 37 52
> 3  3  8 23 38 53
> 4  4  9 24 39 54
> 5  5 10 25 40 55

I see you have gotten acouple of plyr solutions but this is really  
easy in base R:

 > aggregate(daf[-c(1,6)], list(daf$id), mean)
   Group.1 v1 v2 v3 v4
1       1  6 21 36 51
2       2  7 22 37 52
3       3  8 23 38 53
4       4  9 24 39 54
5       5 10 25 40 55

You read this as "use the mean function within categories defined by  
the "id" INDEX to aggregate the columns except tof the first and 6th  
columns"




>
> Currently, I do this in a loop, but I was wondering about a quick  
> and ressource-friendly way to achieve this?
>
> Thanks
> *S*
>
> -- 
> Sascha Vieweg, saschaview at gmail.com
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT