[R] data storage/cubes and pointers in R

Roy Mendelssohn Roy.Mendelssohn at noaa.gov
Thu Nov 9 22:21:45 CET 2006


Look at using netcdf files 
(http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/), and one of several R 
packages for manipulating netcdf files, such as ncdf.

-Roy

At 2:12 PM -0700 11/9/06, Tony Plate wrote:
>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.)
>>
>>
>>	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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>>  and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>______________________________________________
>R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


-- 
**********************
"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S. 
Government or NOAA."
**********************
Roy Mendelssohn
Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
NOAA/NMFS
Environmental Research Division
Southwest Fisheries Science Center
1352 Lighthouse Avenue
Pacific Grove, CA 93950-2097

e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn at noaa.gov (Note new e-mail address)
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"Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill."



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