How do I make a matrix from a list of vectors in R?
Goal: from a list of vectors of equal length, create a matrix where each vector becomes a row.
Example:
> a <- list()
> for (i in 1:10) a[[i]] <- c(i,1:5)
> a
[[1]]
[1] 1 1 2 3 4 5
[[2]]
[1] 2 1 2 3 4 5
[[3]]
[1] 3 1 2 3 4 5
[[4]]
[1] 4 1 2 3 4 5
[[5]]
[1] 5 1 2 3 4 5
[[6]]
[1] 6 1 2 3 4 5
[[7]]
[1] 7 1 2 3 4 5
[[8]]
[1] 8 1 2 3 4 5
[[9]]
[1] 9 1 2 3 4 5
[[10]]
[1] 10 1 2 3 4 5
I want:
[,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,] 1 1 2 3 4 5
[2,] 2 1 2 3 4 5
[3,] 3 1 2 3 4 5
[4,] 4 1 2 3 4 5
[5,] 5 1 2 3 4 5
[6,] 6 1 2 3 4 5
[7,] 7 1 2 3 4 5
[8,] 8 1 2 3 4 5
[9,] 9 1 2 3 4 5
[10,] 10 1 2 3 4 5
Solution 1:
One option is to use do.call()
:
> do.call(rbind, a)
[,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,] 1 1 2 3 4 5
[2,] 2 1 2 3 4 5
[3,] 3 1 2 3 4 5
[4,] 4 1 2 3 4 5
[5,] 5 1 2 3 4 5
[6,] 6 1 2 3 4 5
[7,] 7 1 2 3 4 5
[8,] 8 1 2 3 4 5
[9,] 9 1 2 3 4 5
[10,] 10 1 2 3 4 5
Solution 2:
simplify2array
is a base function that is fairly intuitive. However, since R's default is to fill in data by columns first, you will need to transpose the output. (sapply
uses simplify2array
, as documented in help(sapply)
.)
> t(simplify2array(a))
[,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,] 1 1 2 3 4 5
[2,] 2 1 2 3 4 5
[3,] 3 1 2 3 4 5
[4,] 4 1 2 3 4 5
[5,] 5 1 2 3 4 5
[6,] 6 1 2 3 4 5
[7,] 7 1 2 3 4 5
[8,] 8 1 2 3 4 5
[9,] 9 1 2 3 4 5
[10,] 10 1 2 3 4 5
Solution 3:
The built-in matrix
function has the nice option to enter data byrow
. Combine that with an unlist
on your source list will give you a matrix. We also need to specify the number of rows so it can break up the unlisted data. That is:
> matrix(unlist(a), byrow=TRUE, nrow=length(a) )
[,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,] 1 1 2 3 4 5
[2,] 2 1 2 3 4 5
[3,] 3 1 2 3 4 5
[4,] 4 1 2 3 4 5
[5,] 5 1 2 3 4 5
[6,] 6 1 2 3 4 5
[7,] 7 1 2 3 4 5
[8,] 8 1 2 3 4 5
[9,] 9 1 2 3 4 5
[10,] 10 1 2 3 4 5