Indexing Data Frames in R

R provides many methods for indexing. Coming from other languages, it takes time to get comfortable with indexing in R.

Major Lessons

What is a Data Frame?

Compared to intellectual math challenges, technological issues are very mind scratching for me. After understanding/solving a math problem I feel great, but it is entirely different when I find a bug in my code, I feel dumb. I mean, you can spend a lot of time to be able to do a simple thing, or you may waste a day finding a small bug in your program. And that is the time when I have the most mixed feeling: happy about the achievement and very very angry that my day is gone to fix a single piece.

Recently, I started to learn R, the programming language for statisticians. Unlike other programming languages that I coded in, R has several ways of representing and indexing the abstract object that I call table. A table can be matrix construct or data.frame is R. Data frames are more flexible and are the main point of working with R. You can easily have different data types like factor, numeric, characters in a data frame, and index them with column and row names or numeric indices.

It seems that data frame is implemented as a particular list of lists object. The actual list has a list of columns where each column is a list itself. The only constraint is that the columns should have the same length.
This fact became clear when I did this:

> d <- data.frame()
> class(d)
[1] "data.frame"
> mode(d)
[1] "list"

So at first, I found it less confusing to index the data frame as a list of lists using the regular single and double bracket.
For the ith column as a list (data.frame) one can do d[i], while to view it as the actual type of elements, say numeric, we can do d[[i]] and then proceed with the row indexing by d[[i]][j], noting that d[i][j] is wrong and d[[i]][[j]] is correct but not efficient.
After spending another round cleaning up the code, I got it to the more traditional form of indexing d[i,j] without any problem.

Minor Lessons

Spell Checker Plugin for Notepad++

I started to write most of my notes in Notepad++. The auto-complete feature is very convenient, but there is no spell checking by default. I had to install it as a plugin. You can download plugins from here and put it in the C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins folder and then import it from the Setting. I needed to find x64 compatible because the x32 ones didn’t work. I finally ended up using DSpellCheck.

String Concatenation in R

paste("str1", ...) does the job but the default separator is space to have actual concatenation you need sep="" argument.

Data frames with matrix operations

Interestingly, some matrix operations like transpose accept data frame but spit out matrix class (Again I think the matrix class is implemented as an array c() with two dimensions. So, the class(A) is matrix but the mode(A) is the mode of constituent elements of the corresponding vector.