Getting the minimum of the rows in a data frame

r dataframe min
Joe Ripberger picture Joe Ripberger · Jan 24, 2012 · Viewed 22.9k times · Source

I am working with a dataframe that has 65 variables in it. The first variable catalogs a person, and the next 64 variables indicate the geographic distance that person is from each of 64 locations. Using R, I would like to create a new variable that catalogs the shortest distance for each person to one of those 64 locations.

For example: if person X is 35, 50, 79, 100, 450...miles away from the locations, I would like the new variable to automatically assign them a 35, because this is the shortest distance. Any help with this would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer

Joris Meys picture Joris Meys · Jan 24, 2012

Or, using the example of Justin:

df$shortest <- do.call(pmin,df[-1])

see also ?pmin and ?do.call, and note that you can drop the first variable in your data frame by using the list indices (so not using any comma at all, see also ?Extract )

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