10. Subviews of vectors in R
Last time we reviewed how R let’s you do operations on vectors. Now let’s get a sense for how we can access the elements of a vector:
Access a single element of a vector
To get started, let’s define a vector called x that contains the numbers 10 to 20:
x = 10:20
Here’s what’s in x:
> x
[1] 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Now suppose that we want only the first element of x, which contains the number 10. How do we get it? We type x[1]. Presto, we get back the first element of x:
> x[1]
[1] 10
To access other elements, we just pass their number. Here’s the 9th element:
> x[9]
[1] 18
You can also ask R for elements that are not there. For example, x has 10 elements. If we ask for element 20, we get:
> x[20]
[1] NA
What does this mean? Well, NA is how R says ’nothing here’. It’s telling you that there is nothing in the 20th element of x.
Access multiple elements
Suppose we want to access the first 4 elements of x. That’s easy. To do that, we use the : symbol. Recall that 1:4 will create the numbers 1 to 4:
> 1:4
[1] 1 2 3 4
So to get the first 4 elements of x, we put 1:4 inside our brackets:
> x[1:4]
[1] 10 11 12 13
Or maybe we want elements 4, 5 and 6:
> x[4:6]
[1] 13 14 15
Head
Sometimes we just want the beginning of a vector. For that the head function has your back. By default, head will show you the first 6 elements:
> head(x)
[1] 10 11 12 13 14 15
We can change the number of elements we get back by telling R how many we want like this:
> head(x, 2)
[1] 10 11
We get back the first 2 elements.
Tail
The tail function works exactly like head, except it returns the end of the vector. Here’s the tail of x:
> tail(x)
[1] 15 16 17 18 19 20
You can also tell tail how many elements you want. Here are the last 3:
> tail(x, 3)
[1] 18 19 20
Subset by condition
Sometimes we want to get the elements of a vector that satisfy some condition. For example, suppose we want all of the elements of x that are greater than 15. In R, that’s really easy.
First of all, we can ask R which elements of x are greater than 15. To do that, we type:
x > 15
R will return a list of true/false statements. If the given element is greater than 15, we get TRUE. If not, we get FALSE. Here’s what I get:
[1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
Now, the way R works, we can pass these true/false statements back to our vector x. That will keep the elements that are greater than 15. We do that by putting the condition statement x > 15 inside brackets:
x[x > 15]
Here’s what I get back:
[1] 16 17 18 19 20
If we want to keep these values, we can dump them into another variable, say y:
y = x[x > 15]
A lot of data analysis relies on this conditional type of access.
To get a feel for how it works, try playing around with other conditions. Here are the valid operators:
>: greater than<: less than==equal to!=: not equal to
For example, all the elements of x equal to 15:
x[ x == 15 ]
All the elements of x not equal to 15:
x[ x != 15 ]
Try some combinations out ands see what happens!