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follow up to "need help subsetting a dataframe"

To: "s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu" <s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu>
Subject: follow up to "need help subsetting a dataframe"
From: "Kirk R. Wythers" <kwythers@forestry.umn.edu>
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 16:23:02 -0600
Organization: University of Minnesota
Thankyou everyone for the assistance with my subsetting question. I was
trying to avoid posting a second request in as many hours, but... Here
goes anyway...

I managed to subset my data in a satisfactory manner, now I am trying to

produce a final dataframe that contains means in all numerical columns
by species. The trouble is, there are several columns with  "factor"
data that I don't want to loose.  If I use aggregate()  like this:

> eb.df <-
aggregate(E111BioconData.acan.grwth.df[,50:58],list(Species=E111BioconData.acan.grwth.df$Species),

mean)

it works only because columns 50:58 are numeric, but I loose a column
that contains factor mode info. If I try the same thing on all the data
(attempting to preserve column 9 which contains factor data), Like this:

> eb.df <- aggregate(E111BioconData.acan.grwth.df[,1:58],list(Species=
+ E111BioconData.acan.grwth.df$Species), mean)

I get the error,

"There were 50 warnings (use warnings() to see them) Problem in
data.frameAux.list(x, na.strings = na.str..: Object "n" not found  Use
traceback() to see the call stack"

Which I believe is because several of the columns contain factor data
and I can't use mean() on factor data. Does anyone know a trick to
perform a aggregation on multiple columns of numeric data while
preserving several columns of factor data?

Thanks again,

Kirk


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Kirk R. Wythers                         University of Minnesota
kwythers@lorax.forestry.umn.edu         Department of Forest Resources
tel: 612.625.2261                       1530 Cleveland Ave. N.
fax: 612.625.5212                       Saint Paul, MN 55108
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