use a list. or create new class which is a list
On Jun 16, 2012 8:52 AM, "Onur Uncu" <onuruncu@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello R Community,
>
> I have the following design question. I have a data set that looks
> like this (shortened for the sake of example).
>
> Gender  Age
>  M          70
>  F           65
>  M          70
>
> Each row represents a person with an age/gender combination. We could
> put this data into a data frame.
>
> Now, I would like to do some actuarial analysis on this data set. To
> do so, I need to create and store a mortality curve for each person in
> the table (a mortality curve is a matrix with 2 columns: date and
> survival probability). I can write a function that returns a mortality
> curve given gender and age.  The question is the following: In what
> data format should I store all these mortality curve objects? Should I
> add a column to the data frame and each entry in that column is a
> matrix (a mortality curve)? This way, the mortality curve would be
> stored next to age/gender data in the data frame. However, I read in
> several places that putting vectors/matrices as elements of a data
> frame is a bad idea. I do not know why. What is a good design choice
> in this instance please? How should I store the mortality curves?
>
> Thank you for your help.
>
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