Extracting off-diagonal slice of large matrix

Question

I\'ve got a large nxn matrix and would like to take off-diagonal slices of varying sizes. For example:

1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3          


        

Answer 1

If you want to use upper.tri and lower.tri you could write functions like these:

cormat <- mapply(rep, 1:6, 6)

u.diags <- function(X, n) {
  X[n:nrow(X),][lower.tri(X[n:nrow(X),])] <- NA
  return(X)
}

or

l.diags <- function(X, n) {
  X[,n:ncol(X)][upper.tri(X[,n:ncol(X)])] <- NA
  return(X)
}

or

n.diags <- function(X, n.u, n.l) {
  X[n.u:nrow(X),][lower.tri(X[n.u:nrow(X),])] <- NA
  X[,n.l:ncol(X)][upper.tri(X[,n.l:ncol(X)])] <- NA
  return(X)
}

l.diags(cormat, 3)
u.diags(cormat, 3)
n.diags(cormat, 3, 1)