Data Structures in R

Dr. Mike Brogada - Computational Biology 1

What is Data Structure?
• Collection of data (collection of logical, numeric, integer,
complex, character or raw data)

• Deal with how the data is stored together

• R Data Structures include the Vector, Lists, Matrix,

Arrays, Data Frames and Factors

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Vectors
• collection of similar types of objects
• each element must belong to the same data type

• Example:
> vehicles = c("car","bike","bus")
- Creates a vector of character named vehicles
- c means coerce -> values are converted to the simplest type
required to represent all information
- The ordering is logical<integer<numeric<character.

Dr. Mike Brogada - Computational Biology 3

 Vector with Consecutive Number
The : operator creates a
vector of consecutive
numbers

The seq() function generates a

sequence of number
Syntax – seq(from, to, by, length.out)
1. from – beginning of the sequence
2. to – end of the sequence
3. by – increment by (default is 1)
4. length.out – length of the sequence
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 Operators in R
Arithmetic Relational
1. + = Addition 1. <
2. - = Subtraction 2. >
3. * = Multiplication 3. ==
4. / = Division 4. <=
5. %% = Remainder 5. >=
6. ^ = Exponentiation 6. !=

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 Accessing Vector Elements
• Use [] brackets to access elements, This known as indexing. Indexing
starts with position 1.
• Negative values in the index are used to drop elements
• Boolean values, TRUE or FALSE can be used for indexing

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Matrix

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Matrix
• Collection of elements of the same data type (numeric,
character, or logical) arranged into a fixed number of
rows and columns.

• Since you are only working with rows and columns,

a matrix is called two-dimensional.

• You can construct a matrix in R with the matrix()

function.

Dr. Mike Brogada - Computational Biology 8

Matrix
Syntax: matrix (data,nrow,ncol,byrow,dimnames)

Data: Elements of a matrix

Nrow: Number of rows
Ncol: Number of columns
Byrow: If TRUE then elements are arranged in a row
Dimnames: Names assigned to rows and columns

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Matrix

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Accessing Matrix Elements

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