[BLANK_AUDIO] The apply function is another loop function that's used to evaluate a, a function over the margins of an array. Usu, usually, the function's going to be an anonymous one, like we showed with lapply or it could be a function that already exists like the mean, for example. It's usually used to apply a function to the rows or columns of a matrix. Of course, matrices which are two dimensional arrays, are going to be the most common type of array that we're going to use in R. But you may have three dimensional arrays and such. But you, so you can use apply on general arrays such as taking the average of an array of matrices, for example. One thing to note, and you may hear this out in the wild, occasionally, that apply, using apply is somehow better than ta, using a for loop or somehow it's faster than using a for loop. And that's, generally speaking, not true. It was true a long time ago in older versions of the S language in R but right now, it's not true at all. The main reason you want to use a function like apply is that it involves less typing. And less, less typing is always better, because good programmers are always lazy. So, apply is very useful, but in particular on command line, because on the command line, when we're interacting with data, we're doing exploratory analysis, we want to do as little typing as possible because it just makes our fingers tired. So, how does apply work? So the first argument acts as an array. An array is a vector that has dimensions attached to it. So a matrix is a two dimensional array, for example. A margin, which, which we'll get to in a second. This is a vector, an integer vector that indicates which margin should be retained. And the last important argument is the function that you want to apply to each of the margins. So, and then the dot dot dot argument are other arguments that you want to pass, include other arguments that you want to pass to the function. So here's a matrix that I'm creating, it has 20 rows and ten columns. so, in, in, in the matrix it's just normal random variables that I've generated. So when I apply, so what I want to do is, I want to take this matrix and I want to calculate the mean of each column of the matrix. So the way I can do this is I can apply, use the apply function on x. I give it the margin, two, and I'll say what that means in a second. And I pass the function, mean. And so what happens is, I get back a vector of length ten that has the mean of each of the columns of the matrix. And so the idea is that, so the matrix has ten, sorry, it has 20 rows and ten columns, and so that you can think of the matrix as, as, and so dimension one has 20 rows and dimension two has ten columns. So, when you apply the function, mean, over the matrix, well, the idea is that you want to keep the second dimension, which is the number of columns, and you want to collapse the first dimension, which is the rows. So that, so the idea is that you're taking the mean across all the rows in each column, and then you're, and you're essentially limiting the, the rows from the array, so what you get back is actually has the, has one of the dimensions has been eliminated. It's really the first dimension that's been eliminated. And so you get this number which this vector which has each of the means for each of the columns. similarly, you can take the means of all the rows of the array. And I can, I can call the apply function on x. I give it the dimens, the margin, one, which means preserve all the rows, but collapse all the columns. And then I, I, here I'm calculating the sum of each the rows, instead of the mean. So the, so, I cast the one because it says I want to, I, because of what I mean is I want to preserve the rows and collapse the columns. So here, I got a vector of 20, because there's 20 rows. And each, and inside each and for each row, I calculate the sum of that row. Now for, for simple operations, like calculating the sum, or calculating the mean of a column or a ma, or, or, of a row there are special functions that are highly optimized to do this very quickly. So for calculating the row sums and row means, there's the functions rowSums and rowMeans. And similarly, there's colSums and colMeans, which do the same things for the columns. These are equivalent to using the apply function, but they're very much faster than using the apply, because they're optimized to specifically to do those operations. So if you want to calculate the sum or the mean of a, of a column or row of a matrix, use those functions instead. Now you can, you know, use the apply function to apply other types of functions. For example, suppose you have a matrix. Here, I've generated, again, a matrix of random normal variables, that's 20 rows by 10 columns. And suppose I want to go through each row of the matrix and calculate the twenty-fifth, and the seventy-fifth percentile of that row. So, I can apply on x I, I get, I pass the margin of one, because it means I want to preserve the rows. And then I'm going to pass it the quantile function. Now the quantile function needs, needs, the quantiles that you want to calculate. So there's no default value for that, so I actually have to pass it to the quantile function through the dot dot dot argument of apply. So here, the argument for quarntile is called probs. And I, and I give it 0.25 and 0.75 meaning I want to calculate the twenty-fifth percentile and the seventy-fifth percentile. So what this funct, what this call does is, it goes through each row of the matrix, and for each row, it calculates the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentile. So there's, so for each row, there's going to be two numbers that are returned. And what apply will do is, it'll create a matrix that has two rows, and the number of columns is equal to the number of rows in this matrix, which happens to be 20. So here, I'm going to get a 2 by 20 matrix, where in each column of this return matrix, I've got the twenty-fifth and the seventh, seventy-fifth percentile for the corresponding row. So, for example, in the first row, the twenty-fifth percentile is minus 0.33 and the seventy-fifth percentile is mi, is 0.92 and in the sixteenth row the seventy-fifth, the twenty-fifth percentile is minus 0.95 and the seventy-fifth percentile is 0.88. So you see how that works. Now, suppose I had more than just a matrix. Suppose I, I had an array that I want to do something with. So, the so, here, I'm creating an array with, which has normal random variables and it has two rows and two columns and it's ten and the third dimension is ten. I guess I'm not sure what you would call that dimension. But you can imagine this. You can think of this as being, the, they're a bunch of 2 by 2 matrices that are kind of stacked together. And the idea is that, you can imagine I have a be, a bunch of 2 by 2 matrices, and I want to take the average of those 2 by 2 matrices. So, the average of the, of a bunch of 2 by 2 matrices is going to be another 2 by 2 matrix, which is the mean. And so, I can call apply on this array... And I want to keep the first, and the second dimension, but I want to collapse the third dimension. So here, when I, when I give the margin, I give it one and two, which I want to preserve, and then three is not there, which means I want to collapse third dimension. So here, and then the function I pass it is the mean. So, what this will do is, it'll take my array and it'll collapse, it'll average over the third dimension and give me the mean matrix. Another way that you can do this is to use the rowMeans function, so even though this is in a matrix, you can apply rowMeans to an array. And you give it, and you pass the argument, dims, equal to two.
