On Aug 30, 2011, at 5:00 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:

I don't find how to do what I need to do in Dalgaard or 'R Cookbook', so
I'm asking here.

 I have a data frame with water chemistry data and I want to start
exploring these data. There are three factors (site, date, chemical)
associated with each measurement. The data frame looks like this:

summary(chemdata)
                            site_id.sample_date.param.quant

It appears that your original file was delimited by "|" and your used something else, perhaps the default white-space setting? I think you need to go back and do your input operations again with sep="|"

(Or you could provide str() on the data.frame rather than making us guess.)
--
David

BC-0.5|1996-04-19|Arsenic|0.01              :    1
BC-0.5|1996-04-19|Calcium|76.56             :    1
BC-0.5|1996-04-19|Chloride|12               :    1
BC-0.5|1996-04-19|Magnesium|43.23           :    1
BC-0.5|1996-04-19|Sulfate|175               :    1
BC-0.5|1996-04-19|Total Dissolved Solids|460:    1
(Other)                                     :14880

 I want first to calculate (and plot) descriptive stats by chemical,
ignoring site and date and telling R to ignore missing data. (Incorporating those factors will occur later.) What I have not been able to figure out is
how to specify the command to, for example, calculate mean and sd for
Arsenic. My floundering and thrashing includes attempts like these:

mean(chemdata.param="Arsenic")
Error in is.numeric(x) : 'x' is missing
mean(chemdata.quant, param="Arsenic")
Error in mean(chemdata.quant, param = "Arsenic") :
 object 'chemdata.quant' not found
mean(chemdata$quant, param="Arsenic")
[1] NA
Warning message:
In mean.default(chemdata$quant, param = "Arsenic") :
 argument is not numeric or logical: returning NA

As a newcomer to R I've done a lot of reading, yet all the examples use nicely structured data to illustrate the point being made. I need to work with my data and learn how to specify columns and write correct commands for
the analyses I need. Please point me in the right direction.

Rich

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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT

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