[R] Can the by() function return a single column?

[Gerrit Eichner]

Hello, Vassilis,

maybe

> with( test.df, ave( vector, factor, FUN = function( x) x - mean( x)))

does what you want.


-- Gerrit


On Wed, 15 Dec 2010, Vassilis wrote:

>
> I would like to de-mean the 'vector' column of the following dataframe by
> factor:
>
> set.seed(5444)
> vector	<- rnorm(1:10)
> factor	<- rep(1:2,5)
> test.df	<- data.frame(factor, vector)
>
> which is:
>
>   factor     vector
> 1       1 -0.4963935
> 2       2 -2.0768182
> 3       1 -1.5822224
> 4       2  0.8025474
> 5       1  0.3504199
> 6       2  0.2358464
> 7       1 -0.3989443
> 8       2 -0.3692544
> 9       1 -0.3174586
> 10      2  1.4305431
>
> Using the by() command, I get:
>
>> by(test.df$vector, test.df$factor, function(x) {x - mean(x)})
> test.df$factor: 1
> [1] -0.007473699 -1.093302612  0.839339673  0.089975488  0.171461151
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> test.df$factor: 2
> [1] -2.0813911  0.7979745  0.2312735 -0.3738272  1.4259702
>>
>
> My question is: Is there a way to have this output put back to the
> dataframe? I.e to make by(), or some other command, return me a vector of
> length 10 whose values x' correspond to x'_1 = x_1 - mean(x | factor1), x'_2
> = x_2 - mean(x | factor2),...
>
> Thanks in advance for the help, and apologies for the poor notation.
>
> Vassilis
>
> -- 
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