[See in-line below[ On 16-Apr-2013 17:51:41 Julio Sergio wrote: > I thought I've understood the 'order' function, using simple examples like: > > order(c(5,4,-2)) > [1] 3 2 1 > > However, I arrived to the following example: > > order(c(2465, 2255, 2085, 1545, 1335, 1210, 920, 210, 210, 505, 1045)) > [1] 8 9 10 7 11 6 5 4 3 2 1 > > and I was completely perplexed! > Shouldn't the output vector be 11 10 9 8 7 6 4 1 2 3 5 ? > Do I have a damaged version of R?
I think the simplest explanation can be given as: S <- c(2465, 2255, 2085, 1545, 1335, 1210, 920, 210, 210, 505, 1045) cbind(Index=1:length(S), S, Order=order(S), Sort=sort(S)) Index S Order Sort [1,] 1 2465 8 210 [2,] 2 2255 9 210 [3,] 3 2085 10 505 [4,] 4 1545 7 920 [5,] 5 1335 11 1045 [6,] 6 1210 6 1210 [7,] 7 920 5 1335 [8,] 8 210 4 1545 [9,] 9 210 3 2085 [10,] 10 505 2 2255 [11,] 11 1045 1 2465 showing that the value of 'order' for any one of the numbers is the Index (position) of that number in the original series, placed in the position that number occupies in the sorted series. (With a tie for S[8] = S[9] = 210). For example: which one of S occurs in 5th position in the sorted series? It is the 11th of S (1045). > I became still more astonished when I used the sort function and got the > right answer: > > sort(c(2465, 2255, 2085, 1545, 1335, 1210, 920, 210, 210, 505, 1045)) > [1] 210 210 505 920 1045 1210 1335 1545 2085 2255 2465 > since 'sort' documentation claims to be using 'order' to establish the right > order. Indeed, once you have order(S), you know which element of S to put in each position of the sorted order: S[order(S)] [1] 210 210 505 920 1045 1210 1335 1545 2085 2255 2465 Does this help to explain it? Ted. > Please help me to understand all this! > > Thanks, > > -Sergio. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@wlandres.net> Date: 16-Apr-2013 Time: 19:12:21 This message was sent by XFMail ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.