Advanced R

2

Data structures

This chapter summarises the most important data structures in base R. You’ve probably used many (if not all) of them before, but you may not have thought deeply about how they are interrelated. In this brief overview, I won’t discuss individual types in depth. Instead, I’ll show you how they fit together as a whole. If you need more details, you can find them in R’s documentation.

R’s base data structures can be organised by their dimensionality (1d, 2d, or nd) and whether they’re homogeneous (all contents must be of the same type) or heterogeneous (the contents can be of different types). This gives rise to the five data types most often used in data analysis:

	Homogeneous	Heterogeneous
1d	Atomic vector ...