quick/elegant way to construct mean/variance summary table

Question

I can achieve this task, but I feel like there must be a \"best\" (slickest, most compact, clearest-code, fastest?) way of doing it and have not figured it out so far ...

Answer 1

I find the doBy package has some very convenient functions for things like this. For example, the function ?summaryBy is quite handy. Consider:

> summaryBy(y~f1+f2+f3, data=d, FUN=c(mean, var))
   f1 f2  f3    y.mean       y.var
1   A  a   I 0.6502307 0.095379578
2   A  a  II 0.4876630 0.110796695
3   A  a III 0.3102926 0.202805677
4   A  b   I 0.3914084 0.058693103
5   A  b  II 0.5257355 0.218631264
6   A  b III 0.3356860 0.079433136
7   A  c   I 0.3367841 0.079487973
8   A  c  II 0.6273320 0.041373836
9   A  c III 0.4532720 0.022779672
10  B  a   I 0.6688221 0.044184575
11  B  a  II 0.5514724 0.020359289
12  B  a III 0.6389354 0.104056229
13  B  b   I 0.5052346 0.138379070
14  B  b  II 0.3933283 0.050261804
15  B  b III 0.5953874 0.161943989
16  B  c   I 0.3490460 0.079286849
17  B  c  II 0.5534569 0.207381592
18  B  c III 0.4652424 0.187463143
19  C  a   I 0.3340988 0.004994589
20  C  a  II 0.3970315 0.126967554
21  C  a III 0.3580250 0.066769484
22  C  b   I 0.7676858 0.124945402
23  C  b  II 0.3613772 0.182689385
24  C  b III 0.4175562 0.095933470
25  C  c   I 0.3592491 0.039832864
26  C  c  II 0.7882591 0.084271963
27  C  c III 0.3936949 0.085758343

So the function call is simple, easy to use, and I would say, elegant.

Now, if your primary concern is speed, it seems that it would be reasonable--at least with smaller sized tasks (note that I couldn't get the ramnath_datatable function to work for whatever reason):

                     test replications elapsed relative user.self 
4           dwin_hmisc(d)          100    0.50    2.778      0.50 
3    formula_aggregate(d)          100    0.23    1.278      0.24 
5       gung_summaryBy(d)          100    0.34    1.889      0.35 
1          joran_ddply(d)          100    1.34    7.444      1.32 
2 joshulrich_aggregate(d)          100    0.18    1.000      0.19