The Art of R Programming

Working with Tables

To begin exploring R tables, consider this example:

> u <- c(22,8,33,6,8,29,-2)
> fl <- list(c(5,12,13,12,13,5,13),c("a","bc","a","a","bc","a","a"))
> tapply(u,fl,length)
   a bc
5  2 NA
12 1  1
13 2  1

Here, tapply() again temporarily breaks u into subvectors, as you saw earlier, and then applies the length() function to each subvector. (Note that this is independent of what’s in u. Our focus now is purely on the factors.) Those subvector lengths are the counts of the occurrences of each of the 3 × 2 = 6 combinations of the two factors. For instance, 5 occurred twice with "a" and not at all with "bc"; hence the entries 2 and NA in the first row of the output. In statistics, this is called a contingency table.

There is one problem ...