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Create a new variable and concatenation inside a "for" loop

7 messages · David L Carlson, Jeff Newmiller, Bert Gunter +3 more

#
Hello,

Suppose the you need a loop to create a new variable , i.e., you are not reading data from outside the loop. This is a simple example in Matlab code,

for i=1:5
r1=randn
r2=randn
r=[r1 r2]
c(i,:)=r;   % creation of each row of c , % the ":" symbol indicates all columns. In R this would be [i,]
end

The output of interest is c which I'm creating inside the "for" loop -also the index used in the loop is used to create c. In R I had to create c as an  empty vector (numeric() ) outside the loop, otherwise I get an error message saying that c doesn't exit.

The other issue is the concatenation. In each iteration I'm creating the rows of c by placing the new row  (r) below the previous one so that c becomes a 5 x 2 matrix.
In R, it seems that I have no choice but use the function "rbind". I managed to write this code in R . However, I'm not sure that if instead of creating a new variable  using  the index in the "for" loop , I wanted to use the index to read data, e.g.  suppose I have a 2 X 10 matrix X and suppose I want to calculate the sin () for each 2 x 2 sub-matrix of and stored in a matrix A. Then the code would be something like this,

for i=1:5
A(:, 2*i-1:2*i)= sin(X(:, 2*i-1:2*i))   % the ":" symbol indicates all rows
end

Many Thanks,

Fabiana


Dr Fabiana Gordon

Senior Statistical Consultant
Statistical Advisory Service, School Of Public Health,
Imperial College London
1st Floor, Stadium House, 68 Wood Lane,
London W12 7RH.

Tel: 020 7594 1749
Email: fabiana.gordon at imperial.ac.uk<mailto:fabiana.gordon at imperial.ac.uk>
Web:  www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/support-for-staff/stats-advice-service/<http://www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/support-for-staff/stats-advice-service/>
#
Instead of talking about how you want to do something and showing us your Matlab code, tell us what you want to do, include reproducible data, and show us your R code so far. Your initial assumption, that you need a loop for these examples is incorrect if I have understood you correctly. Many functions in R are vectorized so that loops can often be avoided. 

To create a 5 x 2 matrix of random normal numbers with mean=0 and sd=1:
r1          r2
[1,]  1.3709584 -0.10612452
[2,] -0.5646982  1.51152200
[3,]  0.3631284 -0.09465904
[4,]  0.6328626  2.01842371
[5,]  0.4042683 -0.06271410

To compute sin() on pairs of rows and columns from a 2 x 10 matrix (this time we'll use uniform random numbers):
[,1]      [,2]       [,3]      [,4]      [,5]      [,6]      [,7]        [,8]
[1,] 0.9040314 0.9888917 0.08243756 0.3902035 0.4469696 0.7375956 0.3881083 0.003948339
[2,] 0.1387102 0.9466682 0.51421178 0.9057381 0.8360043 0.8110551 0.6851697 0.832916080
            [,9]     [,10]
[1,] 0.007334147 0.9066014
[2,] 0.207658973 0.6117786
[1] -0.08475853 -0.72287775
[,1]        [,2]
 [1,] -0.084758528 -0.72287775
 [2,]  0.787322543  0.41910237
 [3,] -0.302930277 -0.38159970
 [4,] -0.056735679  0.06967737
 [5,] -0.286552020  0.02494653
 [6,]  0.342416179  0.12555319
 [7,]  0.374780442 -0.14720941
 [8,] -0.003385802  0.58530576
 [9,] -0.782871221 -0.39320949

-------------------------------------
David L Carlson
Department of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77840-4352

-----Original Message-----
From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Gordon, Fabiana
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 9:25 AM
To: 'r-help at R-project.org'
Subject: [R] Create a new variable and concatenation inside a "for" loop

Hello,

Suppose the you need a loop to create a new variable , i.e., you are not reading data from outside the loop. This is a simple example in Matlab code,

for i=1:5
r1=randn
r2=randn
r=[r1 r2]
c(i,:)=r;   % creation of each row of c , % the ":" symbol indicates all columns. In R this would be [i,]
end

The output of interest is c which I'm creating inside the "for" loop -also the index used in the loop is used to create c. In R I had to create c as an  empty vector (numeric() ) outside the loop, otherwise I get an error message saying that c doesn't exit.

The other issue is the concatenation. In each iteration I'm creating the rows of c by placing the new row  (r) below the previous one so that c becomes a 5 x 2 matrix.
In R, it seems that I have no choice but use the function "rbind". I managed to write this code in R . However, I'm not sure that if instead of creating a new variable  using  the index in the "for" loop , I wanted to use the index to read data, e.g.  suppose I have a 2 X 10 matrix X and suppose I want to calculate the sin () for each 2 x 2 sub-matrix of and stored in a matrix A. Then the code would be something like this,

for i=1:5
A(:, 2*i-1:2*i)= sin(X(:, 2*i-1:2*i))   % the ":" symbol indicates all rows
end

Many Thanks,

Fabiana


Dr Fabiana Gordon

Senior Statistical Consultant
Statistical Advisory Service, School Of Public Health,
Imperial College London
1st Floor, Stadium House, 68 Wood Lane,
London W12 7RH.

Tel: 020 7594 1749
Email: fabiana.gordon at imperial.ac.uk<mailto:fabiana.gordon at imperial.ac.uk>
Web:  www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/support-for-staff/stats-advice-service/<http://www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/support-for-staff/stats-advice-service/>




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#
"c" an extremely commonly-used function. Functions are first-class objects that occupy the same namespaces that variables do, so they can obscure each other. In short, don't use variables called "c" (R is case sensitive, so "C" has no such problem).

Wherever possible, avoid incremental concatenation like the plague. If you feel you must use it, at least concatenate in lists and then use functions like unlist, do.call, or pre-allocate vectors or matrix-like objects with unuseful values like NA and then overwrite each element in the vector or matrix-type object in a loop like your first one.
#
...

"(R is case sensitive, so "C" has no such problem)."

Well, not quite. Try ?C

To add to the previous comments, Dr. Gordon appears to need to do
her/his homework and spend some time with an R tutorial or two before
posting further here. There are many good ones on the web. Some
recommendations can be found here:
https://www.rstudio.com/online-learning/#R

Cheers,
Bert


Bert Gunter

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along
and sticking things into it."
-- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )


On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 12:57 PM, Jeff Newmiller
<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote:
#
Maybe I wasn't  clear  about my query. 

I'm very familiar with pre-allocation and vectorization and I had already wrote an R code for this problem in this way. My question wasn't about the most efficient way to solve the problem. It was about whether in R it was possible to use the same  index used in the loop to create a new variable and store the results in as in the example showed below. The use of ?c? was because I was using Matlab, otherwise I know that a new variable shouldn?t have the same name as the name of a function.

Regards,
Fabiana


-----Original Message-----
From: Bert Gunter [mailto:bgunter.4567 at gmail.com] 
Sent: 27 April 2016 21:18
To: Jeff Newmiller
Cc: Gordon, Fabiana; r-help at R-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] Create a new variable and concatenation inside a "for" loop

...

"(R is case sensitive, so "C" has no such problem)."

Well, not quite. Try ?C

To add to the previous comments, Dr. Gordon appears to need to do her/his homework and spend some time with an R tutorial or two before posting further here. There are many good ones on the web. Some recommendations can be found here:
https://www.rstudio.com/online-learning/#R

Cheers,
Bert


Bert Gunter

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along and sticking things into it."
-- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )
On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 12:57 PM, Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote:
#
What's not possible, as far as I know, is to create a variable using an
expression that refers to elements within the variable.

For example, suppose that a some point during my R session, there is no
variable named tmpx:
[1] FALSE

If I try to reference tmpx, in this case by using an extraction operator
Error in tmpx[3] <- 2 : object 'tmpx' not found

it fails. That is, you can't assign to the third element of tmpx when tmpx
doesn't exist, and trying to do so does not automatically create tmpx. As
best as I can tell, this is what you are asking about.

Note that this behavior of the R language has nothing to do with looping
or using a loop index to create a variable, but rather the idea that one
can't reference a non-existant variable.

In this case, I think that the R way of doing things is just different
than the matlab way.


-Don
#
It is possible. 

If the object `c` exists then you can address and assign in the manner you request and in this case we would assume that `c` has 2 columns


for i=1:5 {
  r1=rnorm(1)
  r2=rnorm(1)
  r= c(r1, r2)  # c() being used as the concatenation function
  c[ i, ] =r 
           }
If you are "adding" rows then you do need to use rbind. If you predimension which would always be faster in the long run, then you use "["
There's an array class in R that would allow addressing 2 x 2 slices.
Since `sin` is vectorized (in the R meaning of the term) and A is either a matrix or an array, you could just do this:

A <- sin(X)
David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA