On Aug 20, 2009, at 11:22 AM, Tal Galili wrote:

Hello dear R-help group.

My task looks simple, but I can't seem to find a "smart" (e.g: non loop)
solution to it.

Task: I wish to randomize a data.frame by one column, while keeping the
inner-order in the second column as is.

So for example, let's say I have the following data.frame:

xx <-data.frame(a=  c(1,2,2,3,3,3,4,4,4,4) ,
                       b =  c(1,1,2,1,2,3,1,2,3,4) )

I would like to shuffle it by column "a", while keeping the order in column
"b".

Here is my "not-smart" way of doing it:

# R example
xx <-data.frame(a=  c(1,2,2,3,3,3,4,4,4,4) ,
                       b =  c(1,1,2,1,2,3,1,2,3,4) )

randomize.by.column.a <- function(xx)
{
new.a.order <- sample(unique(xx$a))
new.xx <- NULL
for(i in new.a.order)
{
 xx.subset <- xx[ xx$a %in% i ,]
 new.xx <- rbind(new.xx ,  xx.subset)
}

return(new.xx)
}
randomize.by.column.a(xx)
# END of - R example


It was a bit confusing to read that you wanted to "keep the order in column "b"", but your code implies that you wanted to carry the b- values along with the sorted a-values. I think this achieves the same goal:

xx[sample(1:nrow(xx)), ]

--

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT

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