Question

I am subsetting a dataframe according to multiple criteria across several columns. I am choosing the rows in the dataframe that contain any one of several values defined in the vector “criteria” in any one of three different columns.

I have some code that works, but wonder what other (more elegant?) ways there are to do this. Here is what I’ve done:

criteria <-c(1:10)
subset1 <-subset(data, data[, "Col1"] %in% criteria | data[, "Col2"]
 %in% criteria | data[, "Col3"] %in% criteria)

Suggestions warmly welcomed. (I am an R beginner, so very simple explanations about what you are suggesting are also warmly welcomed.)

Answer 1

I’m not sure if you need two apply calls here:

# Data
df=data.frame(x=1:4,Col1=c(11,12,3,13),Col2=c(9,12,10,13),Col3=c(9,13,42,23))
criteria=1:10

# Solution
df[apply(df [c('Col1','Col2','Col3')],1,function(x) any(x %in% criteria)),]

Unless you want to do a lot of columns, then it is probably more readable to say:

subset(df, Col1 %in% criteria | Col2 %in% criteria | Col3 %in% criteria)