[R] Add function to each row excluding certain columns

[David Winsemius]

On Oct 9, 2013, at 3:31 PM, laro wrote:

> Thank you again! But somehow the which(function) didn't work...
> The problem is, that the columns I want to drop in further calculations will
> not have the same name, that's why I'm looking for a solution to make a
> vector of the columns that should be omitted, like
> 
> omit<-c("Restriction 1","Restriction 2")
> 
> and then simple add the function max to the rows, withour the listed columns
> in omit (I know this doesn't work, but something like this)
> 
> example1New <- cbind(example1, `MAX without
> Restriction`=apply(example1[,-omit],1,max,na.rm=TRUE))

The "-" operator does not succeed in de-selecting named columns when using the"[" function:

Try instead:

example1New <- cbind(example1,
                     `MAX withoutRestriction` =
                          apply(example1[, ! names(example) %in% omit], 1, max,na.rm=TRUE))

The other alternative (to exclude all columns with "Restriction" in their names would be:

   ...(  example1[, -grep("Restriction", names(example) ) ]

Or:

   subset(example, select = -omit)


I think you should abandon the back-tick tricks you are using to preserve spaces in dataframe or matrix column names. I think they will cause problems for you in the future.

> 
> Is there any way?
> 
> Kind regards
> 
> 
> 
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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA