Dear All,

here a problem I think many of you can solve in few minutes.

I have a dataframe which contains values of plot id, diameters, heigths and
basal area of trees, thus columns names are: id | dbh | h | g

head(ipso, n=10)        id dbh     h          g
1  FPE0164  36 13.62 0.10178760
2  FPE0164  31 12.70 0.07547676
21 FPE1127  57 18.85 0.25517586
13 FPE1127  39 15.54 0.11945906
12 FPE1127  34 14.78 0.09079203
6  FPE1127  32 15.12 0.08042477
5  FPE1127  28 14.13 0.06157522
15 FPE1127  27 13.50 0.05725553
19 FPE1127  25 13.28 0.04908739
11 FPE1127  19 11.54 0.02835287

from here I need to calculate the mean of the six greater g_ith for
each id_ith. The clauses are that:

if length(id) >=6

do the mean of the first six greaters g


else
do the mean of all the g_ith in the id_ith (in head print above e.g.
for the id==FPE0164 do the mean of just these two values of g).

The g are already ordered by id ascending and g descending using:

ipso <- ipso[with(ipso, order(ipso$id, -ipso$g)), ] # Order for id
ascending and g descending

I tried a lot of for loops and tapply() without results.

Can anyone help me to solve this?

Thanks for your attention

Best whishes

Matteo

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