tFrame: Transpose a data frame
In lsr: Companion to "Learning Statistics with R"

Description Usage Arguments Details Value See Also Examples

Transposes a data frame, converting variables to cases and vice versa

tFrame(x)

`x`	The data frame to be transposed.

The tFrame function is a convenience function that simply transposes the input data frame and coerces the result back to a data frame. Apart from a very small amount of exception handling, it is equivalent to as.data.frame(t(x)). It exists simply because I sometimes find it convenient when teaching statistics to discuss simple data handling before going into details regarding coercion; similarly, since I generally have students work with data frames before exposing them to matrices, it is convenient to have a transpose function that returns a data frame as output.

Naturally, the tFrame function should only be used when it is actually sensible to think of the cases of x as variables in their own right. In real life I expect that this maps almost perfectly onto those cases where x could be a matrix just as easily as a data frame, so I don't believe that tFrame is useful in real world data analysis. It is intended as a teaching tool.

The transposed data frame

t

# Create a data frame that could sensibly be transposed...
Gf <- c(105, 119, 121, 98)   # fluid intelligence for 4 people
Gc <- c(110, 115, 119, 103)  # crystallised intelligence
Gs <- c(112, 102, 108, 99)   # speed of processing
dataset <- data.frame( Gf, Gc, Gs )
rownames(dataset) <- paste( "person", 1:4, sep="" )
print(dataset)

# Now transpose it...
tFrame( dataset )