R help - Oct 2003 - help with aggregate.survey.design

I am trying to modify aggregate.data.frame to create an aggregate method for 
survey design objects.  I am running into problems because survey design 
objects are lists, with the variables and other design information stored in 
separate dataframes, or objects of other classes, in this list. *Apply and split
functions do not seem to work on the design objects. How do I approach this, 
without having to rewrite *apply and split (and what would that involve?)?  I 
thought of creating lots of subsets, using "subset", but that does not
seem to be
a good approach.

For example, the following line which does most of the work in the 
aggregate.data.frame does not work for design objects:

    y <- lapply(income, tapply, list(age,sex), svymean, brf.d.na,simplify = 
FALSE)

neither does the following:

     y <- lapply(split(income, list(age,sex)), svymean,brf.d.na)

 

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On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 TyagiAnupam at aol.com wrote:
> I am trying to modify aggregate.data.frame to create an aggregate method
for
> survey design objects.  I am running into problems because survey design
> objects are lists, with the variables and other design information stored
in
> separate dataframes, or objects of other classes, in this list. *Apply and
split
> functions do not seem to work on the design objects. How do I approach
this,
> without having to rewrite *apply and split (and what would that involve?)? 
I
> thought of creating lots of subsets, using "subset", but that
does not seem to be
> a good approach.
>
I think the right approach is to extract the `variables' component of the
survey.design, use aggregate on it, and then work out how to attach the
right design metadata (weights, clusters, &c) to it.

This is not completely trivial, or I would have done it already.

	-thomas