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Showing posts from January, 2011

R for beginners and intermediate users 2: extracting subsets of data

For my second post on R, I think I will address how to extract subsets of data based on some selection criterion like taxon names. For instance, I have a huge dataset of morphometric variables for at least 36 species of cats (living and fossil). Sometimes I'd like to do some stats on a subset of this dataset, like all the living cats or just on the Panthera lineage species ( Panthera and Neofelis ). Till recently, I've been doing most of my dataset manipulation in Excel by filtering out certain taxa from the spreadsheet and copy-pasting to a text file, which I read into R. However, you can select subsets of data in R based on taxon names. In my dataset that I call cat , I have a column labelled Taxa which contains all my taxon names. So typing cat$Taxa would be the way to call up my taxon names. Let's say I want to extract from my dataset cat just the data for the lion Panthera leo . The associated taxon names in cat$Taxa would be Panthera_leo . So to extract that