tapply() Function in R

tapply() apply different functions on factor sliced rows, or category statistic.

Firstly, loading a data set.

> library(MASS)
> head(painters)
              Composition Drawing Colour Expression School
Da Udine               10       8     16          3      A
Da Vinci               15      16      4         14      A
Del Piombo              8      13     16          7      A
Del Sarto              12      16      9          8      A
Fr. Penni               0      15      8          0      A
Guilio Romano          15      16      4         14      A

We will use the data "painters" in this library. We could compute mean value of a column

> mean(painters$Composition[painters$School == "C"])
[1] 13.16667

If we want to compute mean value for every different School, we could use tapply()

> tapply(painters$Composition, painters$School, mean)
       A        B        C        D        E        F        G        H 
10.40000 12.16667 13.16667  9.10000 13.57143  7.25000 13.85714 14.00000 

Max value for every different School

> tapply(painters$Composition, painters$School, max)
 A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H 
17 15 16 15 18  9 18 16