Tapply is useful because it splits up a vector into, into little pieces and it applies a, a summary statistic or function to those little pieces, and then after it applies a function it kind of brings the pieces back together again. So so split is not a loop function but it's a very handy function that can be used in conjunction, with functions like lapply or sapply. And so I just want to mention it here. So split takes a vector. So it's kind of like tapply, but it, but it's like tapply but without applying the summary statistics. So what it does, is it takes a vector, or an object x and it takes a factor variable, f. Which again identifies levels of a group. And then it splits the object x into the number of groups that are identified in, in factor f. So for example, if f has three levels identifying three groups, then the split function will split x, into three groups. And so, and then once you've got those groups split apart, you can apply, you can use lapply, or sapply to apply a function to those individual groups. So here is, is a simpler example, similar to what I had before. With tapply example, I've simulated a normal 10 normal random variables with mean zero, 10 uniforms, and 10 normal's with mean one. And has created my factor variable here. And now I'm just going to split the vector into three parts. Because because the factor variable has three levels. So now you can see when I split the x vector. The first, I got a list back and the first element is 10 normals, the second element is 10 uniforms and the third element, which gets a little cutoff here is 10 normals again. So that's what the split function does. And now I've got a, so a split always returns a list back. And so if you want to do something with this list, you can use lapply or sapply. So, here for example, it is common to use the lapply function in conjunction with the split function, so the idea that you split something that lapply function over it. Now, this case, this use of lapply and split is not necessary, because you can use the tapply function which will do the same exact thing. It's not anymore efficient or any worse to do it this way but the tapply function is a little bit more compact. But the nice thing about the split, using the split function is that it can be used to split much more complicated types of objects. So for example, here I've got a data frame for. I'm loading the data sets package and I'm, and I'm looking at the airquality data frame, from the data sets package. So, you can see that this is the first six rows of the data, of this... Data frame I think there's about a hundred some rows total in this data frame. And you see there are measurements on ozone, solar radiation, wind, and temperature, and then the month and the day within that month. And so, one thing I might want to do is, is calculate for example the mean of ozone, solar radiation, wind and temperature in, within each month. So, so for in each month, there's you know, 30 some observations. And I want to calculate the mean within each month. All right, so how do I do this? Well, what I'd like to do is I'd like to split the data frame into monthly pieces. And then once I've split data frame into separate months, I can just calculate the means, the column means using either apply or call means, on those other variables. [SOUND]. So that's what I've done here. What I've done is I split the airquality data frame and this, and the factor I'm going to use to split is the month variable. So the month variable technically speaking, in the data frame is not a factor variable but it can be converted into a factor variable, because it only takes the values 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. Basically because the measurements are only taken in the, kind of, warmer months of the year. So here I've split the airquality variable according to the month variable, and then I'm going to apply. An anonymous function and the anonymous function here, what it does is it takes the column means of just the ozone, solar radiation and wind. So I'm not going to take the mean of temperature here. So I'm just going to take the column means of the, those three variables for each month each column monthly data frames. So here you can see the results. You can't see them all but you can see most of them into lapply is returning a list back, where each element of the list is a vector of length three which is, which is the mean for ozone, the mean for solar radiation and the mean for wind, within that month. As you can see that for, for most of the months the ozone value is NA and that's because when I take the mean of that column there are, and there are missing values in that column and I can't take the mean if there are missing values. So the, the result, when I think the mean is that I just get a missing value back. So one thing I can do is I can. So before I fix the missing value problem, I can also call sapply here. And the idea is that sapply, instead of returning me a list, it will simplify the result because each element of the returned list has a, has a vector of length 3. They're all the same length. So what I'll do is put, put all these numbers into a matrix. Where the three rows and in this case 5 columns. So here you can see the monthly means. For each of the three variables, in a much more compact format, it's in a matrix, instead of a list. Of course I still got NA's for a lot of them, because the missing values in the original data. So one thing I knew is I was going to pass the na.rm argument to call means that would remove the missing values from each column, before its calculating the mean. And that, now when I call sapply on the split list, I can get the, the means of the observed values for each of the three variables for each of the five months. So, so split is a very handy function for splitting arbitrary objects according to the levels of the factor and then applying any type of function. To those split elements of that list. And so here I split a data frame, you can split other lists, you can, and, or other kinds of things too. [SOUND]. So the last thing I want to talk about is splitting on more than one level. So you, in the past couple of examples what I've, I've only had a single factor variable. And I've split whatever the object is with a vector or a data frame. According to the levels of that single factor. But you might have more than one factor. For example, you might have a variable, that, you know, it's gender, so it has male and female. And you might have another variable. That has, for example, the race. And so, you might want to look at the combination of the levels within those factors. And so so here, we've got, I've got f1, which is a factor with two levels. And so I've simulated a normal random variable with 10, with 10 observations. I've got a factor with two levels, and each repeated five times, and then I've got another factor with five levels. If repeated two times. So there are my kind of two category, two group, grouping variables here. And I want to look at the kind of combination of the two. So I can use the interaction function to combine all the levels of the first one with the, all the levels of the second one. And so because there are two levels in the first factor and there is five levels in the second factor and there is a, the total combination of 10 different levels that you can have when you combine the two together. So when you see, when I call, when I called the interaction function I get another factor, that kind of concatenates the levels of one with the other, and you can see that it prints out that there is a total of ten levels. Okay. So, what now I can slit my numeric vector x according to the two different levels. So now, when I Iike, when I use, now one thing, when I use the split function I don't have to use the interaction function. I can just pass it a list with the two factors and it will automatically call the interaction function for me, and create that 10 level interaction factor. So I can just pass the list of these two factors in it, and you can that, it create, it returns me a list with the levels of the 10 different kind of interaction factor levels. And then and then, and then the elements of the numeric factors that are within those 10 levels. Now of course there are, although there are 10 levels between the two different factors, that we don't exactly observe every single combination. And so there are some empty levels here and you can see that some of these levels have nothing in them. They have zero elements, whereas other levels have a number in it. And so, so one thing you can do. Well first I can, I could take this list and, and, and lapply or sapply a function over it, if I wanted to. But, sometimes it's a little bit handy to not have to keep these empty levels. So, so the split function has an argument called drop. And if you specify drop equals true, it will drop. The empty levels, that are created by the splitting. And, and this can be very handy, when you're, you're combining, multiple different factors. If you're only using a single factor, then doesn't, that argument doesn't really do anything, because you'll just use all the, all the levels but, usually. But if you have multiple factors then typically you're going to have empty levels, just because you don't observe every single combination of the two factors. So, so drop equals true will drop those empty levels and then you can have, you'll, you'll will be returned a list, with only the levels, that have observations in them. [SOUND].
