Ask Your Question
1

How can S4 Class be vectorized in R?

asked 2023-05-29 08:16:50 +0000

djk gravatar image

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

1 Answer

Sort by ยป oldest newest most voted
3

answered 2023-05-29 08:28:02 +0000

qstack gravatar image

S4 classes cannot be vectorized in R, as they do not have the necessary attributes to be treated as a vector. However, we can define methods for specific generic functions that help in performing operations on S4 objects stored in a list or a vector.

For example, consider a simple S4 class called "Person" with two slots, "name" and "age":

setClass("Person",
         slots = list(name = "character", age = "numeric"))

We can define a method to extract the names of a list of Person objects as follows:

setMethod("names", signature(x = "list"),
          function(x) sapply(x, function(y) y@name))

Now, we can use the generic function "names" to extract the names of a vector of Person objects:

p1 <- new("Person", name = "Alice", age = 25)
p2 <- new("Person", name = "Bob", age = 30)
persons <- c(p1, p2)

names(persons)

This will return a vector of names: "Alice" "Bob". Similarly, we can define methods for other generic functions like "length", "[[", and so on to perform operations on S4 objects stored in a vector or list.

edit flag offensive delete link more

Your Answer

Please start posting anonymously - your entry will be published after you log in or create a new account. This space is reserved only for answers. If you would like to engage in a discussion, please instead post a comment under the question or an answer that you would like to discuss

Add Answer


Question Tools

Stats

Asked: 2023-05-29 08:16:50 +0000

Seen: 11 times

Last updated: May 29 '23