Create dataframe from a matrix

Solution 1:

If you change your time column into row names, then you can use as.data.frame(as.table(mat)) for simple cases like this.

Example:

data <- c(0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5)
dimnames <- list(time=c(0, 0.5, 1), name=c("C_0", "C_1"))
mat <- matrix(data, ncol=2, nrow=3, dimnames=dimnames)
as.data.frame(as.table(mat))
  time name Freq
1    0  C_0  0.1
2  0.5  C_0  0.2
3    1  C_0  0.3
4    0  C_1  0.3
5  0.5  C_1  0.4
6    1  C_1  0.5

In this case time and name are both factors. You may want to convert time back to numeric, or it may not matter.

Solution 2:

You can use stack from the base package. But, you need first to coerce your matrix to a data.frame and to reorder the columns once the data is stacked.

mat <- as.data.frame(mat)
res <- data.frame(time= mat$time,stack(mat,select=-time))
res[,c(3,1,2)]

  ind time values
1 C_0  0.0    0.1
2 C_0  0.5    0.2
3 C_0  1.0    0.3
4 C_1  0.0    0.3
5 C_1  0.5    0.4
6 C_1  1.0    0.5

Note that stack is generally more efficient than the reshape2 package.