In R functions sometimes produces warnings or errors. In the case of errors execution of a function or a series of commands can get halted when an error occurs, which can in some cases be frustrating especially if we want to continue our calculations. There are various functions available in ... [Read more...]

R can be used to perform various matrix calculations. This include functions for creating matrices (matrix), addition (+), multiplication (%*%) and inversion (solve). Fast Tube by Casper Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material... [Read more...]

Following on from the previous post about creating a football result processing function for data from the football-data.co.uk website we will add code to the function to generate a league table based on the results to date. To create the league table we need to count various things ... [Read more...]

In this post we will make use of football results data from the football-data.co.uk website to demonstrate creating functions in R to automate a series of standard operations that would be required for results data from various leagues and divisions. The first step is to consider what control ... [Read more...]

There are a number of useful functions in R that test the variable type or convert between different variable types. These can be used to validate function input to ensure that sensible answers are returned from a function or to ensure that the function doesn’t fail. Following on from ... [Read more...]

In previous posts (here and here) we created a simple function that returns a single numeric value. In some situations it may be more useful to return a more flexible data type, such as a list object, to provide more information about the calculations that have been performed. We can ... [Read more...]

In a previous post we considered writing a simple function to calculate the volume of a cylinder by specifying the height and radius of the cylinder. The function did not have any checking of the validity of the function arguments which we will consider in this post. R has various ... [Read more...]

One of the benefits of using R for statistical analysis is the programming language which allows users to define their own functions, which is particularly useful for analysis that needs to be repeated. For example, a monthly output from a database may be provided in a pre-determined format and we ... [Read more...]