Question

I have two tables, and I’m trying to look up values from one to add to values in the other. Currently I am using two for loops but they run slowly. I am new to R and know I should avoid looping to speed things up but I can’t figure out how.

Table1 (several thousand rows, 37 columns):

type cat1 cat2 cat3 ... cat36
   1    2    3    2         7
   3    6    2    1         9
   2    4    6    7         4
   3    5    7    8         2
   5    2    2    9         1
   4    3    1    2         3
   1    8    1    4         4
...

Table2 (36 rows, 5 columns):

      type1 type2 type3 type4 type5
cat1      2     3     4     3     8
cat2      8     5     5     2     6
cat3      7     5     1     3     5
...
cat36     4     7     2     8     9

I want to modify each value in Table1 by adding the appropriate value (matching among the 5 types and 36 categories) from Table2. Here are the desired results:

type cat1 cat2 cat3 ... cat36
   1    4   11    9        11
   3   10    7    2        11
   2    7   11   12        11
   3    9   12    9         4
   5   10    8   14        10
   4    6    3    5        11
   1   10    9   11         8
...

Here is my current (slow) code:

for (i in 1:36) {
    for (j in 1:nrow(Table1)) {
        Table1[j,i+1] = Table1[j,i+1] + Table2[i,Table1[j,1]]
    }
}

Answer 1

The type column in Table1 indicates which column in Table2 to add to the rows in Table1. So use the “type” column as an index to the Table2 rows, and then transpose the resulting matrix so you can add rows to rows:

Table3 <- cbind(Table1[ , "type"], 
                t(Table2[ , Table1[ , "type"] ]) + Table1[ , -1])

(I’m assuming that Table1 and Table2 are matrices. If they are data frames you can use Table1$type instead of Table1[,"type"]).