How to find the highest value of a column in a data frame in R?

Similar to colMeans, colSums, etc, you could write a column maximum function, colMax, and a column sort function, colSort.

colMax <- function(data) sapply(data, max, na.rm = TRUE)
colSort <- function(data, ...) sapply(data, sort, ...)

I use ... in the second function in hopes of sparking your intrigue.

Get your data:

dat <- read.table(h=T, text = "Ozone Solar.R Wind Temp Month Day
1     41     190  7.4   67     5   1
2     36     118  8.0   72     5   2
3     12     149 12.6   74     5   3
4     18     313 11.5   62     5   4
5     NA      NA 14.3   56     5   5
6     28      NA 14.9   66     5   6
7     23     299  8.6   65     5   7
8     19      99 13.8   59     5   8
9      8      19 20.1   61     5   9")

Use colMax function on sample data:

colMax(dat)
#  Ozone Solar.R    Wind    Temp   Month     Day 
#   41.0   313.0    20.1    74.0     5.0     9.0

To do the sorting on a single column,

sort(dat$Solar.R, decreasing = TRUE)
# [1] 313 299 190 149 118  99  19

and over all columns use our colSort function,

colSort(dat, decreasing = TRUE) ## compare with '...' above

To get the max of any column you want something like:

max(ozone$Ozone, na.rm = TRUE)

To get the max of all columns, you want:

apply(ozone, 2, function(x) max(x, na.rm = TRUE))

And to sort:

ozone[order(ozone$Solar.R),]

Or to sort the other direction:

ozone[rev(order(ozone$Solar.R)),]

Here's a dplyr solution:

library(dplyr)

# find max for each column
summarise_each(ozone, funs(max(., na.rm=TRUE)))

# sort by Solar.R, descending
arrange(ozone, desc(Solar.R))

UPDATE: summarise_each() has been deprecated in favour of a more featureful family of functions: mutate_all(), mutate_at(), mutate_if(), summarise_all(), summarise_at(), summarise_if()

Here is how you could do:

# find max for each column
ozone %>%
         summarise_if(is.numeric, funs(max(., na.rm=TRUE)))%>%
         arrange(Ozone)

or

ozone %>%
         summarise_at(vars(1:6), funs(max(., na.rm=TRUE)))%>%
         arrange(Ozone)

In response to finding the max value for each column, you could try using the apply() function:

> apply(ozone, MARGIN = 2, function(x) max(x, na.rm=TRUE))
  Ozone Solar.R    Wind    Temp   Month     Day 
   41.0   313.0    20.1    74.0     5.0     9.0