[R] Loop over factor returns NA

[Jim Lemon]

On 10/13/2013 02:12 AM, anna berg wrote:
> Dear R users,
>
> I am pretty new to programming in R. So I guess there is some obvious mistake I am making. I hope you can help me.
> I have a data frame that looks like this:
>
>>   AB
>          time        x        y       z         gene       part
> 1   03:27:58     1       2        3        grom         1
> 2   03:27:58     2       3        4        grom         1
> 3   03:27:58     3       4        5        grom         1
> 4   04:44:23    12      13      14      grom         2
> 5   04:44:23    13      14      15      grom         2
> 6   04:44:23    14      15      16      grom         2
> 7   04:44:23    15      16      17      grom         2
> 8   06:23:45   101     102    103    vir             3
> 9   06:23:45   102     103    104    vir             3
> 10 06:23:45   103     104    105    vir             3
>
> Now I want to apply a loop (here a simplified version; I know that I could do this easily with tapply, but for the other things that I want to do with the loop (e.g. weighted mean of time series after fast fourier transformation) I would rather like to use a loop).
> Note that "time" and "part" are actually the same, just one is a factor and the the other is a number.
> Here is the loop that works fine and returns the result as I want (the important part here is: Intervall<- AB[AB$part==i,]):
>
>   for(i in 1:length(unique(AB$time)))
>   {
>      Intervall<- AB[AB$part==i,]
>      attach(Intervall)
>      # Standart deviation
>      sdx<-sd(x)
>      sdy<-sd(y)
>      sdz<-sd(z)
>      # Add Behavior
>       gene<- as.character(Intervall[1,5])
>      # Construct a table
>        tab<-c(sdx, sdy, sdz, gene)
>        write(tab, file=paste("VariableTable.txt", sep=""),
>                 ncolumns=4,sep=",", append=TRUE)
>      detach(Intervall)
>   }  # end of for loop
>
> The result looks like this and is fine:
>
> 1,1,1,grom
> 1.3,1.3,1.3,grom
> 1,1,1,vir
>
> My problem is, that I used the "part" column only to run the loop, but I actually want to use the time column to run the loop. But when I replace
>
> Intervall<- AB[AB$part==i,]
> with
> Intervall<- AB[AB$time==i,]
>
> then the resulting table only contains NA.
>
> I also tried to use Intervall<- AB[x==i,]
>
> x<- as.factor(AB$part) -->  which works fine as well
> x<- as.factor(AB$time) -->  which returns only NA
> x<- unique(AB$time) --->  which returns only NA
> x<- levels(unique(AB$time) -->  which returns only NA
> x<- seq(unique(AB$time) --->  which returns the standard deviation of the entire column (not the single parts)
>
Hi Anna,
If "time" is a factor, then perhaps:

for(i in unique(AB$time)) {
...

this should also work if "time" is a character vector. I would look at:

unique(AB$time)

to see what is there.

Jim