CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Andre
Andre

Reputation: 123

Using a variable to point to a vector

I am trying to a comparison between many different items using a Spearman test(from the package pspearman). I would like to have a way to automate the switching in of variables so that rather than running it one of at a time and running it would be able to just switch in each one and run all at once.

I tried to pass the list of the vectors that I would like to compare it to.

spearman.test(access_sam2$Area,access_sam2$B)

All the columns are in the dataframe access_sam2. In the y, position there is a list of columns that I need to run:

"CD8_PD1, CD8_PDL1, CD8_GBNEG_FOXP3, CD8_GBNEG_FOXP3_CD45RO, CD8_GBNEG_FOXP3NEG_CD45RO, CD8NEG_PD1, CD8NEG_PDL1, CD8NEG_FOXP3, CD8NEG_FOXP3_CD45RO,CD68_PDL1, CK_PDL1."

The problem is that it is not possible to use indexes because they are not sequential columns, and has 660+ columns. I could write 7 spearman tests but changing all 7 for each Area variable seems inefficent

Upvotes: 0

Views: 54

Answers (1)

G. Grothendieck
G. Grothendieck

Reputation: 269586

First set yvars to be a character variable which names the columns you want or is a numeric variable that gives their column numbers. We have shown the first few elements of it below. Then we define a function which takes a variable name and outputs the spearman test. Finally use Map to apply that function to each component of yvars.

yvars <- c("CD8_PD1", "CD8_PDL1", "CD8_GBNEG_FOXP3")
sptest <- function(yvar) spearman.test(access_sam2$Area, access_sam2[[yvar]])
Map(sptest, yvars)

Reproducible example

Below is a reproducible example using the mtcars data frame that comnes with R.

library(pspearman)

yvars <- c("cyl", "disp", "hp")
sptest <- function(yvar) spearman.test(mtcars$mpg, mtcars[[yvar]])
Map(sptest, yvars)

Upvotes: 2

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