One-to-one matching?
My thanks to Gabor Grothendieck, Charles C. Berry and Moshe Olshansky for their suggested solutions. The upshot of which is that a nice one-line solution to my one-to-one exact matching problem is the Grothendieck-Berry collaboration of match(make.unique(matchSample), make.unique(lookupTable)) I've settled on this particular solution as it appears to be the fastest of the three possibilities given, although Moshe's solution comes a close second :-) Many thanks... Alec
On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 10:57 PM, <Alec.Zwart at csiro.au> wrote:
Hi folks,
Can anyone suggest an efficient way to do "matching without
replacement", or "one-to-one matching"? pmatch() doesn't quite
provide what I need...
For example,
lookupTable <- c("a","b","c","d","e","f")
matchSample <- c("a","a","b","d")
##Normal match() behaviour:
match(matchSample,lookupTable)
[1] 1 1 2 4
My problem here is that both "a"s in matchSample are matched to the
same "a" in the lookup table. I need the elements of the lookup table
to be excluded from the table as they are matched, so that no match
can be found for the second "a".
Function pmatch() comes close to what I need:
pmatch(matchSample,lookupTable)
[1] 1 NA 2 4
Yep! However, pmatch() incorporates partial matching, which I
definitely don't want:
lookupTable <- c("a","b","c","d","e","aaaaaaaaf")
matchSample <- c("a","a","b","d")
pmatch(matchSample,lookupTable)
[1] 1 6 2 4
## i.e. the second "a", matches "aaaaaaaaf" - I don't want this.
Of course, when identical items ARE duplicated in both sample and
lookup table, I need the matching to reflect this:
lookupTable <- c("a","a","c","d","e","f")
matchSample <- c("a","a","c","d")
##Normal match() behaviour
match(matchSample,lookupTable)
[1] 1 1 3 4
No good - pmatch() is better:
lookupTable <- c("a","a","c","d","e","f")
matchSample <- c("a","a","c","d")
pmatch(matchSample,lookupTable)
[1] 1 2 3 4
...but we still have the partial matching issue...
##And of course, as per the usual behaviour of match(), sample
elements missing from the lookup table should return NA:
matchSample <- c("a","frog","e","d") ; print(matchSample)
match(matchSample,lookupTable)
Is there a nifty way to get what I'm after without resorting to a for
loop? (my code's already got too blasted many of those...)
Thanks,
Alec Zwart
CMIS CSIRO
alec.zwart at csiro.au
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