What is the most useful R trick? [closed]

Answer 1

Upon Dirk's advice, I am posting single examples. I hope they are not too "cute" [clever, but I don't care] or trivial for this audience.

Linear models are the bread and butter of R. When the number of independent variables is high, one has two choices. The first is to it use lm.fit(), which receives the design matrix x and the response y as arguments, similarly to Matlab. The drawback to this approach is that the return value is a list of objects (fitted coefficients, residuals, etc), not an object of class "lm", which can be nicely summarized, used for prediction, stepwise selection, etc. The second approach is create a formula:

> A
           X1         X2          X3         X4         y
1  0.96852363 0.33827107 0.261332257 0.62817021 1.6425326
2  0.08012755 0.69159828 0.087994158 0.93780481 0.9801304
3  0.10167545 0.38119304 0.865209832 0.16501662 0.4830873
4  0.06699458 0.41756415 0.258071616 0.34027775 0.7508766
   ...

> (f=paste("y ~",paste(names(A)[1:4],collapse=" + ")))
[1] "y ~ X1 + X2 + X3 + X4"

> lm(formula(f),data=A)

Call:
lm(formula = formula(f), data = A)

Coefficients:
(Intercept)           X1           X2           X3           X4  
    0.78236      0.95406     -0.06738     -0.43686     -0.06644  

Answer 2

Definitively system(). To be able to have access to all the unix tools (at least under Linux/MacOSX) from inside the R environment has rapidly become invaluable in my daily workflow.

Answer 3

One of my favorite, if not somewhat unorthodox tricks, is the use of eval() and parse(). This example perhaps illustrates how it can be helpful

NY.Capital <- 'Albany'
state <- 'NY'
parameter <- 'Capital'
eval(parse(text=paste(state, parameter, sep='.')))

[1] "Albany"

This type of situation occurs more often than not, and use of eval() and parse() can help address it. Of course, I welcome any feedback on alternative ways of coding this up.

Answer 4

For those who are writing C to be called from R: .Internal(inspect(...)) is handy. For example:

> .Internal(inspect(quote(a+2)))
  @867dc28 06 LANGSXP g0c0 [] 
  @8436998 01 SYMSXP g1c0 [MARK,gp=0x4000] "+"
  @85768b0 01 SYMSXP g1c0 [MARK,NAM(2)] "a"
  @8d7bf48 14 REALSXP g0c1 [] (len=1, tl=0) 2

Answer 5

One very useful function I often use is dput(), which allows you to dump an object in the form of R code.

# Use the iris data set
R> data(iris)
# dput of a numeric vector
R> dput(iris$Petal.Length)
c(1.4, 1.4, 1.3, 1.5, 1.4, 1.7, 1.4, 1.5, 1.4, 1.5, 1.5, 1.6, 
1.4, 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 1.3, 1.4, 1.7, 1.5, 1.7, 1.5, 1, 1.7, 1.9, 
1.6, 1.6, 1.5, 1.4, 1.6, 1.6, 1.5, 1.5, 1.4, 1.5, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 
1.3, 1.5, 1.3, 1.3, 1.3, 1.6, 1.9, 1.4, 1.6, 1.4, 1.5, 1.4, 4.7, 
4.5, 4.9, 4, 4.6, 4.5, 4.7, 3.3, 4.6, 3.9, 3.5, 4.2, 4, 4.7, 
3.6, 4.4, 4.5, 4.1, 4.5, 3.9, 4.8, 4, 4.9, 4.7, 4.3, 4.4, 4.8, 
5, 4.5, 3.5, 3.8, 3.7, 3.9, 5.1, 4.5, 4.5, 4.7, 4.4, 4.1, 4, 
4.4, 4.6, 4, 3.3, 4.2, 4.2, 4.2, 4.3, 3, 4.1, 6, 5.1, 5.9, 5.6, 
5.8, 6.6, 4.5, 6.3, 5.8, 6.1, 5.1, 5.3, 5.5, 5, 5.1, 5.3, 5.5, 
6.7, 6.9, 5, 5.7, 4.9, 6.7, 4.9, 5.7, 6, 4.8, 4.9, 5.6, 5.8, 
6.1, 6.4, 5.6, 5.1, 5.6, 6.1, 5.6, 5.5, 4.8, 5.4, 5.6, 5.1, 5.1, 
5.9, 5.7, 5.2, 5, 5.2, 5.4, 5.1)
# dput of a factor levels
R> dput(levels(iris$Species))
c("setosa", "versicolor", "virginica")

It can be very useful to post easily reproducible data chunks when you ask for help, or to edit or reorder the levels of a factor.

Answer 6

One nice feature: Reading data uses connections which can be local files, remote files accessed via http, pipes from other programs or more.

As a simple example, consider this access for N=10 random integers between min=100 and max=200 from random.org (which supplies true random numbers based on atmospheric noise rather than a pseudo random number generator):

R> site <- "http://random.org/integers/"         # base URL
R> query <- "num=10&min=100&max=200&col=2&base=10&format=plain&rnd=new"
R> txt <- paste(site, query, sep="?")            # concat url and query string
R> nums <- read.table(file=txt)                  # and read the data
R> nums                                          # and show it
   V1  V2
1 165 143
2 107 118
3 103 132
4 191 100
5 138 185
R>

As an aside, the random package provides several convenience functions for accessing random.org.