Finding row index containing maximum value using R

Question

Given the following matrix lets assume I want to find the maximum value in column two:

mat <- matrix(c(1:3,7:9,4:6), byrow = T, nc = 3)
mat
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    2    3
[2,]    7    8    9
[3,]    4    5    6

I know max(mat[,2]) will return 8. How can I return the row index, in this case row two?

Answer 1

There is a function max.col(). For every row it finds which column has the maximum value:

max.col(mat)
[1] 3 3 3

To find the maximum row for each column instead, simply transpose the matrix:

max.col(t(mat))
[1] 2 2 2

Answer 2

A different way using dplyr:

mat <- matrix(c(1:3,7:9,4:6), byrow = T, nc = 3)
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    2    3
[2,]    7    8    9
[3,]    4    5    6

mat %>% as_tibble() %>% filter( V2 == max(V2) )

# A tibble: 1 x 3
     V1    V2    V3
  <int> <int> <int>
1     7     8     9

Answer 3

How about the following, where y is the name of your matrix and you are looking for the maximum in the entire matrix:

row(y)[y==max(y)]

if you want to extract the row:

y[row(y)[y==max(y)],] # this returns unsorted rows.

To return sorted rows use:

y[sort(row(y)[y==max(y)]),]

The advantage of this approach is that you can change the conditional inside to anything you need. Also, using col(y) and location of the hanging comma you can also extract columns.

y[,col(y)[y==max(y)]]

To find just the row for the max in a particular column, say column 2 you could use:

seq(along=y[,2])[y[,2]==max(y[,2])]

again the conditional is flexible to look for different requirements.

See Phil Spector's excellent "An introduction to S and S-Plus" Chapter 5 for additional ideas.

Answer 4

See ?which.max

> which.max( matrix[,2] )
[1] 2

Answer 5

See ?order. You just need the last index (or first, in decreasing order), so this should do the trick:

order(matrix[,2],decreasing=T)[1]