Hi Kasper,
On 07/12/2016 09:31 AM, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote:
combine() is the old style way of combining ExpressionSets and friends and is pretty powerful, for example dealing with pData objects with different columns (which is the case for almost all data). It seems to me that cbind() on SummarizedExperiments is much less powerful. Specifically rbind() on DataFrame's (for colData) requires that the two DataFrame's have the same columns. I think this should be addressed.
A 1st little step that would maybe help would be to have rbind() on DataFrame objects work when the columns are the same but not in the same order. This is something that works with ordinary data frames. That being said, we might want to do more e.g. have cbind() on SummarizedExperiment objects work when the colData don't have the same columns. And I guess that would be pretty much it for the improvements to cbind,SummarizedExperiment. It needs to stick to the cbind semantic i.e. it should not try to merge assay columns and should preserve the nb of rows. As Michael pointed out, that kind of feature (i.e. merging assay columns and/or rows) would belong to something like a merge() or maybe a combine(). H.
It is not clear to me that rbind() doesn't do the right thing, but in that case perhaps we do need combine() for SummarizedExperiment's and DataFrame's Or perhaps Im doing it wrong. Best, Kasper [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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