Dear John-Paul, Take a look at https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2009-July/204027.html It contains different ways to do (in part) what you want.
HTH, Jorge On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 11:22 AM, John-Paul Ferguson <> wrote: > I apologize for how basic a question this is. I am a Stata user who > has begun using R, and the syntax differences still trip me up. The > most basic questions, involving as they do general terms, can be the > hardest to find solutions for through search. > > Assume for the moment that I have a dataset that contains seven > variables: Pollution, Temp, Industry, Population, Wind, Rain and > Wet.days. (This actual dataset is taken from Michael Crawley's > "Statistics: An Introduction Using R" and is available as > "pollute.txt" in > http://www.bio.ic.ac.uk/research/crawley/statistics/data/zipped.zip.) > Assume I have attached pollute. Then > > cor(pollute) > > will give me the correlation table for these seven variables. If I > would prefer only to see the correlations between, say, Pollution, > Temp and Industry, I can get that with > > cor(pollute[,1:3]) > > or with > > cor(pollute[1:3]) > > Similarly, I can see the correlations between Temp, Population and Rain > with > > cor(pollute[,c(2,4,6)]) > > or with > > cor(pollute[c(2,4,6)]) > > This is fine for a seven-variable dataset. When I have 250 variables, > though, I start to pale at looking up column indexes over and over. I > know from reading the list archives that I can extract the column > index of Industry, for example, by typing > > which("Industry"==names(pollute)) > > but doing that before each command seems dire. Trained to using Stata > as I am, I am inclined to check the correlation of the first three or > the second, fourth and sixth columns by substituting the column names > for the column indexes--something like the following: > > cor(pollute[Pollution:Industry]) > cor(pollute[c(Temp,Population,Rain)]) > > These however throw errors. > > I know that many commands in R are perfectly happy to take variable > names--the regression models, for example--but that some do not. And > so I ask you two general questions: > > 1. Is there a syntax for referring to variable names rather than > column indexes in situations like these? > 2. Is there something that I should look for in a command's help file > that often indicates whether it can take column names rather than > indexes? > > Again, apologies for asking something that has likely been asked > before. I would appreciate any suggestions that you have. > > Best, > John-Paul Ferguson > Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior > Stanford University Graduate School of Business > 518 Memorial Way, K313 > Stanford, CA 94305 > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org 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. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org 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.