converting output of R's “by” command to data frame

Question

I\'m trying to use R\'s by command to get column means for subsets of a data frame. For example, consider this data frame:

> z = data.frame(         


        

Answer 1

You can use ddply from plyr package

library(plyr)
ddply(z, .(labels), numcolwise(mean))
  labels data.1 data.2 data.3 data.4
1      a    1.5    6.5   11.5   16.5
2      b    3.0    8.0   13.0   18.0
3      c    4.5    9.5   14.5   19.5

Or aggregate from stats

aggregate(z[,-1], by=list(z$labels), mean)
  Group.1 data.1 data.2 data.3 data.4
1       a    1.5    6.5   11.5   16.5
2       b    3.0    8.0   13.0   18.0
3       c    4.5    9.5   14.5   19.5

Or dcast from reshape2 package

library(reshape2)
dcast( melt(z), labels ~ variable, mean)

Using sapply :

 t(sapply(split(z[,-1], z$labels), colMeans))
  data.1 data.2 data.3 data.4
a    1.5    6.5   11.5   16.5
b    3.0    8.0   13.0   18.0
c    4.5    9.5   14.5   19.5