[R] "apply" question

Christoph Scherber Christoph.Scherber at uni-jena.de
Mon May 2 16:52:48 CEST 2005


Dear R users,

I´ve got a simple question but somehow I can´t find the solution:

I have a data frame with columns 1-5 containing one set of integer 
values, and columns 6-10 containing another set of integer values. 
Columns 6-10 contain NA´s at some places.

I now want to calculate
(1) the number of values in each row of columns 6-10 that were NA´s
(2) the sum of all values on columns 1-5 for which there were no missing 
values in the corresponding cells of columns 6-10.


Example: (let´s call the data frame "data")

Col1   Col2   Col3   Col4   Col5   Col6   Col7   Col8   Col9   Col10
1      2      5      2      3      NA      5      NA    1      4
3      1      4      5      2      6      NA      4     NA     1

The result would then be (for the first row)
(1) "There were 2 NA´s in columns 6-10."
(2) The mean of Columns 1-5 was 2+2+3=7" (because there were NA´s in the 
1st and 3rd position in rows 6-10)

So far, I know how to calculate the rowSums for the data.frame, but I 
don´t know how to condition these on the values of columns 6-10

rowSums(data[,1:5]) #that´s straightforward
apply(data[,6:19],1,function(x)sum(is.na(x))) #this also works fine

But I don´t know how to select just the desired values of columns 1-5 
(as described above)


Can anyone help me? Thanks a lot in advance!

Best regards
Christoph




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