I am trying to determine the mean of multiple vectors. Is there a more efficient alternative than using assign within a loop to calculate the means, as I do below?
a=c(1,2,3,4)
b=c(1,3,4,3,4)
c=c(3,9,4,2,7,3,7)
for (i in c("a","b","c")) {
assign(paste(i,"mean", sep = ""), mean(get(i)))
}
Instead of creating a new variable for each vector you want to take the mean of, I would calculate and store the average of each vector together with something like:
means <- sapply(mget(c("a", "b", "c")), mean)
This returns a named vector of averages; the average of each variable can be accessed by name:
means["a"]
# a
# 2.5
means["b"]
# b
# 3
means["c"]
# c
# 5
Note that this will probably simplify the code you use after calculating the means. If you had var <- "a" indicating the variable you wanted to process, you can now get its mean with means[var] instead of needing to use something clunky like get(paste0(var, "mean")).
list2env('names<-'(lapply(list(a,b,c), mean), paste0(c('a', 'b', 'c'),'mean')),.GlobalEnv)Although you should learn to work with lists to avoid this syntax