How to succinctly write a formula with many variables from a data frame?

Question

Suppose I have a response variable and a data containing three covariates (as a toy example):

y = c(1,4,6)
d = data.frame(x1 = c(4,-1,3), x2 = c(3,9,8), x3 =         


        

Answer 1

An extension of juba's method is to use reformulate, a function which is explicitly designed for such a task.

## Create a formula for a model with a large number of variables:
xnam <- paste("x", 1:25, sep="")

reformulate(xnam, "y")
y ~ x1 + x2 + x3 + x4 + x5 + x6 + x7 + x8 + x9 + x10 + x11 + 
    x12 + x13 + x14 + x15 + x16 + x17 + x18 + x19 + x20 + x21 + 
    x22 + x23 + x24 + x25

For the example in the OP, the easiest solution here would be

# add y variable to data.frame d
d <- cbind(y, d)
reformulate(names(d)[-1], names(d[1]))
y ~ x1 + x2 + x3

or

mod <- lm(reformulate(names(d)[-1], names(d[1])), data=d)

Note that adding the dependent variable to the data.frame in d <- cbind(y, d) is preferred not only because it allows for the use of reformulate, but also because it allows for future use of the lm object in functions like predict.