Equivalent to rowMeans() for min()

Question

I have seen this question being asked multiple times on the R mailing list, but still could not find a satisfactory answer.

Suppose I a matrix m

Answer 1

Quite late to the party, but as the author of matrixStats and in case someone spots this, please note that matrixStats::rowMins() is very fast these days, e.g.

library(microbenchmark)
library(Biobase)     # rowMin()
library(matrixStats) # rowMins()
options(digits=3)

m <- matrix(rnorm(10000000), ncol=10) 

stats <- microbenchmark(
  rowMeans(m), ## A benchmark by OP
  rowMins(m),
  rowMin(m),
  do.call(pmin, as.data.frame(m)),
  apply(m, MARGIN=1L, FUN=min),
  times=10
)

> stats
Unit: milliseconds
                             expr    min     lq   mean median     uq    max
                      rowMeans(m)   77.7   82.7   85.7   84.4   90.3   98.2
                       rowMins(m)   72.9   74.1   88.0   79.0   90.2  147.4
                        rowMin(m)  341.1  347.1  395.9  383.4  395.1  607.7
  do.call(pmin, as.data.frame(m))  326.4  357.0  435.4  401.0  437.6  657.9
 apply(m, MARGIN = 1L, FUN = min) 3761.9 3963.8 4120.6 4109.8 4198.7 4567.4