R help - Mar 2012 - Why does this work? plyr within-subset normalization

Working code that normalize each row's value against the subset's
maximum.



Does the invocation of max() somehow instruct R to 'step back' and
evaluate
the subset?

Thanks, Zack

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To those without access to nabble, the code in reference is:

relative <- ddply(ranktable, .(Timestamp), function(x)
data.frame(relative = x[,5]/max(x[,5])))


I may be misunderstanding your question, but:

ddply splits your data.frame, ranktable, by the column Timestamp into
many smaller data.frames, one for each unique Timestamp value.

Those new small data.frames are sent one at a time to the function you
specify.
So, when you call max(x[,5]) you're taking the max of the data.frame
sent to the function rather than the max of the larger ranktable
data.frame.




On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 10:18 AM, z2.0 <zack.abrahamson at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Working code that normalize each row's value against the subset's
maximum.
>
>
>
> Does the invocation of max() somehow instruct R to 'step back' and
evaluate
> the subset?
>
> Thanks, Zack
>
> --
> View this message in context:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Why-does-this-work-plyr-within-subset-normalization-tp4512989p4512989.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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