R help - Oct 2003 - A data frame of data frames

Hello,

I'm trying to set up the flowwing data structure in R:

A data frame with 7,000 rows and 4 colums. The rownames have some special
meaning (they are names of genes). The 1st column per row is itself a data
frame, and columns 2 to 4 will keep numeric values.

The data frame contained in the 1st column will have 54 rows (with special
names) and 4 colums (1st col is a response, cols 2- 4 are factors). Each of
these data frames with the response/factors will be fed into an 3way linear
model for anova. The other colums of the 1st data will hold the p-values.

Basically running 7,000 anovas is very quick but the reformating of the data
so that it is suitable for the anova takes a long time (45 minutes). So I'd
just like to keep the generated data structure as a persistent R object.

I haven't managed to store the 2nd data frame in the 1st colum of the 1st
data frame.
>From other languages such as C I'd know how to setup this kind of data
structure (pointers), but I get stuck in R (I guess I'm still struggling the
way the R philosophy on how to present data structures).

Do you've any suggestions on how to do this?

	kind regards,

	Arne

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 Arne.Muller at aventis.com wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to set up the flowwing data structure in R:
>
> A data frame with 7,000 rows and 4 colums. The rownames have some special
> meaning (they are names of genes). The 1st column per row is itself a data
> frame, and columns 2 to 4 will keep numeric values.
>
> The data frame contained in the 1st column will have 54 rows (with special
> names) and 4 colums (1st col is a response, cols 2- 4 are factors). Each of
> these data frames with the response/factors will be fed into an 3way linear
> model for anova. The other colums of the 1st data will hold the p-values.
I would use a list with the genes in a matrix and the other variables in a
dataframe.

(In fact, I would try to use the data structures that the bioconductor
project has developed for this problem.)

	-thomas