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Loops Lapply

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13 views12 pages

Loops Lapply

Uploaded by

Hameedat Abdussalam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Introduction to the R Language

Loop Functions

Roger D. Peng, Associate Professor of Biostatistics


Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Looping on the Command Line
Writing for, while loops is useful when programming but not particularly easy when working
interactively on the command line. There are some functions which implement looping to make life
easier.

· lapply: Loop over a list and evaluate a function on each element

· sapply: Same as lapply but try to simplify the result

· apply: Apply a function over the margins of an array

· tapply: Apply a function over subsets of a vector

· mapply: Multivariate version of lapply

An auxiliary function split is also useful, particularly in conjunction with lapply.

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lapply
lapply takes three arguments: (1) a list X; (2) a function (or the name of a function) FUN; (3) other
arguments via its ... argument. If X is not a list, it will be coerced to a list using as.list.

lapply

## function (X, FUN, ...)


## {
## FUN <- match.fun(FUN)
## if (!is.vector(X) || is.object(X))
## X <- as.list(X)
## .Internal(lapply(X, FUN))
## }
## <bytecode: 0x7ff7a1951c00>
## <environment: namespace:base>

The actual looping is done internally in C code.

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lapply
lapply always returns a list, regardless of the class of the input.

x <- list(a = 1:5, b = rnorm(10))


lapply(x, mean)

## $a
## [1] 3
##
## $b
## [1] 0.4671

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lapply
x <- list(a = 1:4, b = rnorm(10), c = rnorm(20, 1), d = rnorm(100, 5))
lapply(x, mean)

## $a
## [1] 2.5
##
## $b
## [1] 0.5261
##
## $c
## [1] 1.421
##
## $d
## [1] 4.927

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lapply
> x <- 1:4
> lapply(x, runif)
[[1]]
[1] 0.2675082

[[2]]
[1] 0.2186453 0.5167968

[[3]]
[1] 0.2689506 0.1811683 0.5185761

[[4]]
[1] 0.5627829 0.1291569 0.2563676 0.7179353

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lapply
> x <- 1:4
> lapply(x, runif, min = 0, max = 10)
[[1]]
[1] 3.302142

[[2]]
[1] 6.848960 7.195282

[[3]]
[1] 3.5031416 0.8465707 9.7421014

[[4]]
[1] 1.195114 3.594027 2.930794 2.766946

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lapply
lapply and friends make heavy use of anonymous functions.

> x <- list(a = matrix(1:4, 2, 2), b = matrix(1:6, 3, 2))


> x
$a
[,1] [,2]
[1,] 1 3
[2,] 2 4

$b
[,1] [,2]
[1,] 1 4
[2,] 2 5
[3,] 3 6

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lapply
An anonymous function for extracting the first column of each matrix.

> lapply(x, function(elt) elt[,1])


$a
[1] 1 2

$b
[1] 1 2 3

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sapply
sapply will try to simplify the result of lapply if possible.

· If the result is a list where every element is length 1, then a vector is returned

· If the result is a list where every element is a vector of the same length (> 1), a matrix is returned.

· If it can’t figure things out, a list is returned

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sapply
> x <- list(a = 1:4, b = rnorm(10), c = rnorm(20, 1), d = rnorm(100, 5))
> lapply(x, mean)
$a
[1] 2.5

$b
[1] 0.06082667

$c
[1] 1.467083

$d
[1] 5.074749

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sapply
> sapply(x, mean)
a b c d
2.50000000 0.06082667 1.46708277 5.07474950

> mean(x)
[1] NA
Warning message:
In mean.default(x) : argument is not numeric or logical: returning NA

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