similar to: constrOptim parameters

Dear R wizards: is there a clean way to assign to elements in a list? what I would like to do, in pseudo R+perl notation is f <- function(a,b) list(a+b,a-b) (c,d) <- f(1,2) and have c be assigned 1+2 and d be assigned 1-2. right now, I use the clunky x <- f(1,2) c <- x[[1]] d <- x[[2]] rm(x) which seems awful. is there a nicer syntax? regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch

dear R wizards: an operation I execute often is the deletion of all observations (in a matrix or data set) that have at least one NA. (I now need this operation for kde2d, because its internal quantile call complains; could this be considered a buglet?) usually, my data sets are small enough for speed not to matter, and there I do not care whether my method is pretty inefficient (ok, I

dear wizards: my .Rprofile has just one command for testing, loadhistory("~/.Rhistory") but this gives me an error on R startup: Error: couldn't find function "loadhistory" Invoking loadhistory() as the first interactive command works fine; incidentally, I believe loadhistory() in the .Rprofile worked in earlier or other platform R releases, too. Is the .Rprofile

Dear R Wizards---is it possible to get R to show its current call stack (sys.calls()) upon an error abort? I don't use ESS for execution, and it is often not obvious how to locate how I triggered an error in an R internal function. Seeing the call stack would make this easier. (right now, I sprinkle "cat" statements everywhere, just to locate the line where the error appears.) Of

dear R experts: has someone written a function that returns the results of by() as a data frame? ??of course, this can work only if the output of the function that is an argument to by() is a numerical vector. presumably, what is now names(byobject) would become a column in the data frame, and the by object's list elements would become columns. it's a little bit like flattening the by()

dear R wizards:? I am wrestling with reshape.? I have a long data set that I want to convert into a wide data set, in which rows are firms and columns are years. > summary(rin) firm fyear sim1 Min. :1004.00 Min. :1964.0 Min. : -1.00000 1st Qu.:1010.00 1st Qu.:1979.0 1st Qu.: -0.14334 Median :1016.00 Median :1986.0 Median : 0.00116 Mean

dear R wizards: I have a large data frame, a million rows, 40 columns. In this data frame, there are some (about 100,000) rows which I want to recompute (update), while I want to leave others just as is. this is based on a condition that I need to compute, based on what is in a few of the columns. what is the right R way to do this? I could subset out the rows that I want to recompute into a

dear R experts---now I have a case where I want to estimate very large regression models with many fixed effects---not just the mean type, but cross-fixed effects---years, months, locations, firms. Many millions of observations, a few thousand variables (most of these variables are interaction fixed effects). could someone please point me to packages, if any, that would help me estimate such

dear R wizards: here is the strange question for the day. It seems to me that nrow() is very slow. Let me explain what I mean: ds= data.frame( NA, x=rnorm(10000) ) ## a sample data set > system.time( { for (i in 1:10000) NA } ) ## doing nothing takes virtually no time user system elapsed 0.000 0.000 0.001 ## this is something that should take time; we need to add 10,000

I ran into an interesting oddity of R, if (0) { print(1); } else { print(2); } is a syntax error, while if (0) { print(1); } else { print(2); } or if (0) { print(1); } else { print(2); } is not. I presume it has to do with the duality of the newline functioning as an end of command (;) character, though it still seems a bit odd, and it took me a while to figure out

dear R experts---I am using the coef() function to pick off the coefficients from an lm() object. alas, I also need the standard errors and I need them fast. I know I can do a "summary()" on the object and pick them off this way, but this computes other stuff I do not need. Or, I can compute (X' X)^(-1) s^2 myself. Has someone written a fast se() function? incidentally, I think

I am about to write a "cluster-lite" R solution for myself. I wanted to know whether it already exists. If not, I will probably write up how I do this, and I will make the code available. Background: we have various linux and OSX systems, which are networked, but not set up as a cluster. I have no one here to set up a cluster, so I need a "hack" that facilitates parallel

this is not an important question, but I wonder why lm returns an error, and whether this can be shut off. it would seem to me that returning NA's would make more sense in some cases---after all, the problem is clearly that coefficients cannot be computed. I know that I can trap the lm.fit() error---although I have always found this to be quite inconvenient---and this is easy if I have only

dear R wizards---more ignorance on my part, exacerbated by too few examples in the function documentations. > d <- data.frame( id=rep(1:3,3), x=rnorm(9), y=rnorm(9)) Question 1: how do I work with the output of "by"? for example, > b <- by( d, d$id, function(x) coef(lm( y ~ x, data=x ) )) > b d$id: 1 (Intercept) x 0.2303 0.3618

Dear R experts--- Has anyone written parallel versions of "by" (i.e., mcby) and "ave" (i.e. mcave) ? I did ask a question like this a year ago, and then the answer was no. for those who are googling the group for the answer to this question, in the meantime, the poor man's version of "by" is mclapply( split( ds, factor ), FUN ) I don't know the poor

dear R experts---is there a function that prints a data frame to a string? cat() cannot handle lists, so I cannot write cat("your data frame is:\n", df, "\n"). regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch@gmail.com) [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Sorry, one more: on OSX, I deleted my old 2.9.2 R.app, and installed the 64 bit version of 2.9.0. I then did an "install.packages("car")" under my new 2.9.0. It seems to have worked, but alas, I still get an error that package 'car' was built under R version 2.9.2 . Where exactly does R under OSX install its packages? (is it a bug that another car is loaded?) PS:

is it possible to throw a stop() that is so hard that it will escape even tryCatch? /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at gmail.com)

dear r experts---Is there a multicore equivalent of by(), just like mclapply() is the multicore equivalent of lapply()? if not, is there a fast way to convert a data.table into a list based on a column that lapply and mclapply can consume? advice appreciated...as always. regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at gmail.com)

Dear R wizards: under R-2.1.0: eargs <- 3:5; line <- paste(c("echo A B", eargs)); cat("executing from R: '", line, "'\n"); system(line); Oddly, only "A" and "B" are echoed, not the eargs. I had hoped that line would be one string at this point, and for printing this seems to be true. However, unlist(line) still gives me the 4