Quickly remove zero variance variables from a data.frame

Question

I have a large data.frame that was generated by a process outside my control, which may or may not contain variables with zero variance (i.e. all the observations are the sa

Answer 1

You may also want to look into the nearZeroVar() function in the caret package.

If you have one event out of 1000, it might be a good idea to discard these data (but this depends on the model). nearZeroVar() can do that.

Answer 2

Well, save yourself some coding time:

Rgames: foo
      [,1]  [,2] [,3]
 [1,]    1 1e+00    1
 [2,]    1 2e+00    1
 [3,]    1 3e+00    1
 [4,]    1 4e+00    1
 [5,]    1 5e+00    1
 [6,]    1 6e+00    2
 [7,]    1 7e+00    3
 [8,]    1 8e+00    1
 [9,]    1 9e+00    1
 [10,]    1 1e+01    1
Rgames: sd(foo)
[1] 0.000000e+00 3.027650e+00 6.749486e-01
Warning message:
sd(<matrix>) is deprecated.
 Use apply(*, 2, sd) instead.   

To avoid nasty floating-point roundoffs, take that output vector, which I'll call "bar," and do something like bar[bar< 2*.Machine$double.eps] <- 0 and then finally your data frame dat[,as.logical(bar)] should do the trick.