[R] data storage/cubes and pointers in R

[Tony Plate]

What kind of operations do you need to be able to do?  I frequently use 
3 and higher dimensional arrays for storing data, and then I use 
indexing operations to extract slices of data, or sometimes apply() and 
friends to process the data.

The abind() function (in the 'abind' package) will bind together vectors 
and arrays into higher dimensional arrays -- it might come in handy for you.

-- Tony Plate

Piet van Remortel wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am faced with the situation where I want to store/analyze  
> relatively large, organized sets of numerical data, which depend on a  
> number of conditions (biological properties, exposure times,  
> concentrations etc etc).  Imagine about a hundred dataframes of a few  
> thousand numerical values, with some annotation in text for some  
> entries.
> 
> Intuitively, I would like to be able to slice the data in a 'data- 
> cube' kind of way to query, analyze, cluster, fit etc., which  
> resembles the database data-cube way of thinking common in de db  
> world these days. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cube )
> 
> I have no knowledge of a package that supports such things in an  
> elegant way within R.  If this exists, please point me to it.
> 
> Also considering implementing a similar setup myself, I started  
> wondering about the possibility of use references (or "pointers"  
> aargh) to dataframes and store them in a list etc.   Separate lists  
> can then represent different 'views' on the shared instance  
> dataframes etc.   I have no knowledge if that is even possible in R,  
> and if that is even the smart way to do it.  If someone could provide  
> some help, that would be great.
> 
> Other option is of course to link to MySQL and do all data handling  
> in that way.  Also considering that.
> 
> Any thoughts/hints would be appreciated !
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Piet
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Dr. P. van Remortel
> Intelligent Systems Lab
> Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science
> University of Antwerp
> Belgium
> http://www.islab.ua.ac.be
> +32 3 265 33 57 (secr.)
> 
> 
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