Day_1 Part_1 Data type in R :classes and structures

1. Introduction

R is an object-oriented programming language. Almost anything in R could be an object.

2. Datatype in R

a. Summary

NB:
(1) numeric class in R should be double/floating point.
(2) We would say factor is something between class and structure. It is a structure but behave more like a class.
(3) Different with python, we call string as character in R.
(4) Some useful function to check the type of an object:

Function	Application
typeof()	what is it? i.e. how is it saved in memory? (not common used)
class()	what is it? i.e. how is it used in functions?
str()	what is the structure? (frequently used, also tell you class)

(5)
Conversion between different classes/structures: as.numeric(), as.logical(), as.integer(), as.factor(), as.character(), as.matrix(), as.list, as.data.frame()…
Logical test for class/structures of object: is.numeric(), is.logical(), is.integer(), is.factor(), is.character(), is.matrix(), is.list(), is.data.frame() …

b. Logical values

Logical values are created by logical expressions. When coerced to numeric, TRUE = 1, FALSE = 0.
logical operators:

Operators	Use
>	less than
>=	less than or equal
<	greater than
<=	greater than or equal
==	equal to
!=	not equal
!	not
&	and
|	or

c. factor

Factors used for classification - categories
Take gender as an example:

d. special values

Missing numbers are NA
Undefined numbers (e.g. division by zero) are NaN

3. Frequently-used function:

Function	application
c(x1, x2)	combine things together
min(x)	minimum value
max(x)	maximum value
range(x)	get the range.same as c(min(x),max(x))
length(x)	get the length of x
sort(x) ; order(x, …)	sorting
sum()	sum
prod()	product
mean(), median(), sd(), var()	statistical functions to get mean, median, standard derivation, variance
summary(x)	statistical summary
paste()	see example below (detail see in ?paste())

paste() 函数：