similar to: big quasi-fixed effects OLS model

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 readers---I struggled with how to do nice fixed-effects regressions in large economic samples for a while. Eventually, I realized that nlme is not really what I needed (too complex), and all I really wanted is the plm package. so, I thought I would share a quick example. ################ sample code to show fixed-effects models? in R # create a sample panel data set with firms and years

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 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

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

As an end-user, I wonder about Revolution R. Is the relationship between Revolution R and the R community at-large a positive one? Do the former contribute to the development efforts of the latter? Is there a competitive aspect? is their forum competitive with r-help? any other thoughts? (most of all, I simply hope that they help some of the many helpful experts on this forum, who have

dear R group: I have the probably fairly common problem that I would like to have one code.R file do different things if it is invoked from a symbolic link, which should be easy to uncover. $ ln -s code.R code-0.R $ ln -s code.R code-1.R $ R CMD BATCH code-1.R what needs to be in code-1.R to put code-1.r into a character vector? help appreciated. regards, /ivo welch PS : I read

dear R experts---quick question. I need to estimate a model that looks like y = (b*T+d*T^3) + (1-b-3*d*T^2)*x + (3*d*T)*x^2 + (-d)*x^3 I only have three parameters. Is nls() the right tool for the job, or is there something faster/better? /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch@brown.edu, ivo.welch@gmail.com) [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

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

dear R experts--- t <- 1:30 f <- function(t) { cat("f for", t, "\n"); return(2*t) } g <- function(t) { cat("g for", t, "\n"); return(3*t) } s <- ifelse( t%%2==0, g(t), f(t)) shows that the ifelse function actually evaluates both f() and g() for all values first, and presumably then just picks left or right results based on t%%2.

Dear R experts--- after many years, I am planning to give in and write my first R package. I want to combine my collection of collected useful utility routines. as my guide, I am planning to use Friedrich Leisch's "Creating R Packages: A Tutorial" from Sep 2009. Is there a newer or better tutorial? this one is 4 years old. I also plan on one change---given that the

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)

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 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]]

Dear R wizards: I decided to take the advice in the R data import/export manual and want to learn how to work with SQL for large data sets. I am trying SQLite with the DBI and RSQLite database interfaces. Speed is nice. Alas, I am struggling to find a tutorial that is geared for the kind of standard operations that I would want in R. Simple things: * how to determine the number of rows in a

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 experts--- I am experimenting with multicore processing, so far with pretty disappointing results. Here is my simple example: A <- 100000 randvalues <- abs(rnorm(A)) minfn <- function( x, i ) { log(abs(x))+x^3+i/A+randvalues[i] } ?## an arbitrary function ARGV <- commandArgs(trailingOnly=TRUE) if (ARGV[1] == "do-onecore") { ?library(foreach) ?discard <-

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---I am trying to replicate a perl feature. I want to be able to embed R commands inside a character string, and have the string be printed with the command executed. my perl equivalent is my $a=10; my $teststring = "the expression, $a+1, is ::$a+1::, but add one more for ::$a+2::\n"; $teststring =~ s/::(.*?)::/$1/gee; print $teststring; of course, R does not use

R version 2.5.0, under gentoo linux. This may be just my ignorance about naming conventions inside loops and subsets, but the following appears like a bug to me. y = c( 1963, 1963, 1964, 1964, 1965, 1965 ); r1= rnorm(6); d= data.frame ( y=y, r1=r1 ); ## note: I am not attach()ing anything anywhere ## this should give me two results, which it does ahw.y= subset(d, d$y==1963);