[R] Why does this work? plyr within-subset normalization

[Justin Haynes]

To those without access to nabble, the code in reference is:

relative <- ddply(ranktable, .(Timestamp), function(x)
data.frame(relative = x[,5]/max(x[,5])))


I may be misunderstanding your question, but:

ddply splits your data.frame, ranktable, by the column Timestamp into
many smaller data.frames, one for each unique Timestamp value.

Those new small data.frames are sent one at a time to the function you
specify.
So, when you call max(x[,5]) you're taking the max of the data.frame
sent to the function rather than the max of the larger ranktable
data.frame.




On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 10:18 AM, z2.0 <zack.abrahamson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Working code that normalize each row's value against the subset's maximum.
>
>
>
> Does the invocation of max() somehow instruct R to 'step back' and evaluate
> the subset?
>
> Thanks, Zack
>
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