matrix package:base R Documentation _M_a_t_r_i_c_e_s _D_e_s_c_r_i_p_t_i_o_n: 'matrix' creates a matrix from the given set of values. 'as.matrix' attempts to turn its argument into a matrix. 'is.matrix' tests if its argument is a (strict) matrix. _U_s_a_g_e: matrix(data = NA, nrow = 1, ncol = 1, byrow = FALSE, dimnames = NULL) as.matrix(x, ...) ## S3 method for class 'data.frame': as.matrix(x, rownames.force = NA, ...) is.matrix(x) _A_r_g_u_m_e_n_t_s: data: an optional data vector. nrow: the desired number of rows. ncol: the desired number of columns. byrow: logical. If 'FALSE' (the default) the matrix is filled by columns, otherwise the matrix is filled by rows. dimnames: A 'dimnames' attribute for the matrix: 'NULL' or a 'list' of length 2 giving the row and column names respectively. An empty list is treated as 'NULL', and a list of length one as row names. The list can be named, and the list names will be used as names for the dimensions. x: an R object. ...: additional arguments to be passed to or from methods. rownames.force: logical indicating if the resulting matrix should have character (rather than 'NULL') 'rownames'. The default, 'NA', uses 'NULL' rownames if the data frame has 'automatic' row.names or for a zero-row data frame. _D_e_t_a_i_l_s: If one of 'nrow' or 'ncol' is not given, an attempt is made to infer it from the length of 'data' and the other parameter. If neither is given, a one-column matrix is returned. If there are too few elements in 'data' to fill the array, then the elements in 'data' are recycled. If 'data' has length zero, 'NA' of an appropriate type is used for atomic vectors ('0' for raw vectors) and 'NULL' for lists. 'is.matrix' returns 'TRUE' if 'x' is a matrix and has a 'dim' attribute of length 2) and 'FALSE' otherwise. Note that a 'data.frame' is *not* a matrix by this test. It is generic: you can write methods to handle specific classes of objects, see InternalMethods. 'as.matrix' is a generic function. The method for data frames will return a character matrix if there is any non-(numeric/logical/complex) column, applying 'format' to non-character columns. Otherwise, the usual coercion hierarchy (logical < integer < double < complex) will be used, e.g., all-logical data frames will be coerced to a logical matrix, mixed logical-integer will give a integer matrix, etc. When coercing a vector, it produces a one-column matrix, and promotes the names (if any) of the vector to the rownames of the matrix. 'is.matrix' is a primitive function so any argument name is ignored. _R_e_f_e_r_e_n_c_e_s: Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) _The New S Language_. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. _S_e_e _A_l_s_o: 'data.matrix', which attempts to convert to a numeric matrix. _E_x_a_m_p_l_e_s: is.matrix(as.matrix(1:10)) !is.matrix(warpbreaks)# data.frame, NOT matrix! warpbreaks[1:10,] as.matrix(warpbreaks[1:10,]) #using as.matrix.data.frame(.) method # Example of setting row and column names mdat <- matrix(c(1,2,3, 11,12,13), nrow = 2, ncol=3, byrow=TRUE, dimnames = list(c("row1", "row2"), c("C.1", "C.2", "C.3"))) mdat