Question

I had a question regarding the colMeans function. Is there a version of this that will not return an error when it runs into a column of length one? For example

temp<-cbind(c(2,2),c(3,4))
colMeans(temp)

[1] 2.0 3.5

But for this one

temp2<-c(2,2)
colMeans(temp2)

Error in colMeans(temp2) : 
'x' must be an array of at least two dimensions

But, if I apply the function mean to each column it properly comes up with the value of 2 and 2.

I wrote a function to do this

testfun<-function(i,x){
mean(x[,i])
}
sapply(1:ncol(x),testfun,x)

which gives the same results as colMeans.
I’ve heard that colMeans is supposed to be much faster than this method. So, is there a version of colMeans that will work when my column is of size 1.

Answer 1

As @Paul points out, colMeans expects “an array of two or more dimensions” for its x argument (from ?colMeans). But temp2 is not an array

is.array(temp2)
# [1] FALSE

temp2 can be made into an array:

(tempArray <- array(temp2, dim = c(1, 2)))
#      [,1] [,2]
# [1,]    2    2

colMeans(tempArray)
# [1] 2 2

Perhaps temp2 came from subsetting an array, such as

array(temp2, dim = c(2, 2))[1, ]

But this is not an array. To keep it as an array, add drop = FALSE inside the brackets:

array(temp2, dim = c(2, 2))[1, , drop = FALSE]
#      [,1] [,2]
# [1,]    2    2

Then you can use colMeans on the subsetted array.