Lecture 3: R-Blocks

Matrices & Lists

Ivan Belik

Assembled and built based on:

https://openlibra.com/en/book/download/an-introduction-to-r-2
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R: Creating Matrices
• To create matrices we use the matrix() function

• The matrix() function takes the following arguments:

• data an R object: vector

• nrow the desired number of rows

• ncol the desired number of columns

• byrow a logical statement to populate the matrix by either row or by column

• Example 1:

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R: Matrix characteristics
• We can also check some characteristics:

• dim() – the dimension of matrix (i.e., number of rows and columns)

• nrow() – the number of rows

• ncol() – the number of columns

dim(Matrix1) will give us: nrow(Matrix1) will give us: ncol(Matrix1) will give us:
> dim(Matrix1) > nrow(Matrix1) > ncol(Matrix1)
> [1] 3 3 [1] 3 [1] 3

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R: Creating Matrices
• we can drop the argument names in matrix() as long as you remember that:

• the first argument asks for the data

• the second - for the rows

• the third - for the columns

• Example 2:

• Let’s create a rectangular matrix (3 by 7) and fill it with NA’s

• NA is a useful special object existing in R

• NA is a kind of a special zero and most computations involving NA return NA

• NA + 1 evaluates to NA

• NA == TRUE returns NA

• In addition, we used dim() function

in the code to check matrix dimension

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R: Creating Matrices
• Example 3

Let’s fill a matrix with a vector of values

Note: we did not use ncol argument (but, in the Example 3 the matrix with nrow=4 is the same one as with ncol=3)

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R: Creating Matrices
• Example 4

You can also create matrices by pasting together vectors using:

• rbind() function: it combines vectors by rows

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R: Creating Matrices
• Example 4

Another way to create matrices by pasting vectors together using:

• cbind() function: it combines vectors by columns

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R: Matrices
• As we could see, rbind() and cbind() functions automatically label row or column names

• You can also use:

• rownames() function - to manipulate rows’ names

• colnames() function - to manipulate columns’ names

Let us consider an example on the following slide

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R: Matrices

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R: Matrices
• The diag() function is useful for creating the identity matrix

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R: Indexing matrices
• Use [i, j] to retrieve the j-th element of the i-th row:

• Note: the matrix is filled by columns as the parameter byrow = FALSE

byrow = FALSE by default – no need to specify it in the matrix()-function if we agree with the default value of the given parameter

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R: Indexing matrices
• You can also extract entire rows as vectors by leaving the column entry blank, and vice versa

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R: Matrix operations
• R can do matrix arithmetic. Below is a list of some basic operations we can do:

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R: Matrix operations

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R: Matrix operations
• To compute eigenvalues and vectors you can use the eigen() function

• Unlike most functions we have encountered so far, it does not return a vector or a matrix but a list

• Reminder: List can be a collection of different types of objects

• The eigen(X) function returns a list containing:

• eigenvalues
• eigenvectors

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R: Matrix operations
• You can extract named elements from a list with the $ symbol

• To see the names of the elements we use function names()

• Consider the following code:

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R: Lists and matrices
• We can use list() function to store vectors and matrices in one variable (which is a list-type):

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R: Lists and matrices
• To access elements of the list:

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R: Lists and matrices
• To access the list’s elements we can write one-line request:

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R: Lists and matrices
• We can also assign names to the elements of the list

• Then we can access the elements using $assigned_name

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R: Lists: more details
• You can do different manipulations with variables in the lists:

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