The question is some years old but maybe some people are still interested in alternative answers.
If you don't want to load any packages, you might use this function:
#' Converts three columns of a data.frame into a matrix -- e.g. to plot
#' the data via image() later on. Two of the columns form the row and
#' col dimensions of the matrix. The third column provides values for
#' the matrix.
#'
#' @param data data.frame: input data
#' @param rowtitle string: row-dimension; name of the column in data, which distinct values should be used as row names in the output matrix
#' @param coltitle string: col-dimension; name of the column in data, which distinct values should be used as column names in the output matrix
#' @param datatitle string: name of the column in data, which values should be filled into the output matrix
#' @param rowdecreasing logical: should the row names be in ascending (FALSE) or in descending (TRUE) order?
#' @param coldecreasing logical: should the col names be in ascending (FALSE) or in descending (TRUE) order?
#' @param default_value numeric: default value of matrix entries if no value exists in data.frame for the entries
#' @return matrix: matrix containing values of data[[datatitle]] with rownames data[[rowtitle]] and colnames data[coltitle]
#' @author Daniel Neumann
#' @date 2017-08-29
data.frame2matrix = function(data, rowtitle, coltitle, datatitle,
rowdecreasing = FALSE, coldecreasing = FALSE,
default_value = NA) {
# check, whether titles exist as columns names in the data.frame data
if ( (!(rowtitle%in%names(data)))
|| (!(coltitle%in%names(data)))
|| (!(datatitle%in%names(data))) ) {
stop('data.frame2matrix: bad row-, col-, or datatitle.')
}
# get number of rows in data
ndata = dim(data)[1]
# extract rownames and colnames for the matrix from the data.frame
rownames = sort(unique(data[[rowtitle]]), decreasing = rowdecreasing)
nrows = length(rownames)
colnames = sort(unique(data[[coltitle]]), decreasing = coldecreasing)
ncols = length(colnames)
# initialize the matrix
out_matrix = matrix(NA,
nrow = nrows, ncol = ncols,
dimnames=list(rownames, colnames))
# iterate rows of data
for (i1 in 1:ndata) {
# get matrix-row and matrix-column indices for the current data-row
iR = which(rownames==data[[rowtitle]][i1])
iC = which(colnames==data[[coltitle]][i1])
# throw an error if the matrix entry (iR,iC) is already filled.
if (!is.na(out_matrix[iR, iC])) stop('data.frame2matrix: double entry in data.frame')
out_matrix[iR, iC] = data[[datatitle]][i1]
}
# set empty matrix entries to the default value
out_matrix[is.na(out_matrix)] = default_value
# return matrix
return(out_matrix)
}
How it works:
myData = as.data.frame(list('dim1'=c('x', 'x', 'x', 'y','y','y'),
'dim2'=c('a','b','c','a','b','c'),
'values'=c(1,2,3,3,3,2)))
myMatrix = data.frame2matrix(myData, 'dim1', 'dim2', 'values')
myMatrix
> a b c
> x 1 2 3
> y 3 3 2
