Hi there,

another beginners question, I'm afraid. Basically i want to selct the
maximum of values, that correspond to different variables. I have a table
of oil production that looks somewhat like this:

oil <- data.frame( YEAR = c(2011, 2012),
                   TX = c(20000, 30000),
                   CA = c(40000, 25000),
                   AL = c(20000,
21000),

                   ND = c(21000,60000))

Now I want to find out, which state produced most oil in a given year. I
tried this:

attach(oil)
last_year = oil[ c(YEAR == 2012), ]
max(last_year)

Which works, but it doesnt't give me the corresponding values (i.e. it just
gives me the maximum output, not what state its from).
So I tried this:

oil[c(oil == max(last_year)),]
and this:
oil[c(last_year == max(last_year)),]
and this:
oil[which.max(last_year),]
and this:
last_year[max(last_year),]

None of them work, but they don't give error messages either, the output is
just "NA". The problem is, in my eyes, that I'm comparing the values of
different variables with each other. Because if i change the structure of
the dataframe (which I can't do with the real data, at least not with out
doing it by hand with a huge dataset), it looks like this and works
perfectly:

oil2 <- data.frame (
  names = c('YEAR', 'TX', 'CA', 'AL', 'ND'),
  oil_2011 = c(2011, 20000, 40000, 20000, 21000),
  oil_2012 = c(2012, 30000, 25000, 21000, 60000)
  )
attach(oil2)
oil2[c(oil_2012 == max(oil_2012)),]

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks, Tim Umbach

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