Here is short post to describe how to calculate the average rank from a set of multiple ranks listed in different
data.frames in R. This is a fairly straightforward procedure, however, it took me more time than I anticipated to make this
work.
To begin with, let's create a set of data.frames with and randomly assign them rank values from 1 to 5 for the letters
A,B,C,D,E:
data.frames <- lapply(1:5, function(X) {
data.frame(name=LETTERS[1:5], rank=sample(1:5))
})
## [[1]] ## name rank ## 1 A 2 ## 2 B 3 ## 3 C 4 ## 4 D 1 ## 5 E 5 ## ## [[2]] ## name rank ## 1 A 4 ## 2 B 3 ## 3 C 5 ## 4 D 2 ## 5 E 1 ## ## [[3]] ## name rank ## 1 A 2 ## 2 B 5 ## 3 C 1 ## 4 D 4 ## 5 E 3 ## ## [[4]] ## name rank ## 1 A 2 ## 2 B 5 ## 3 C 3 ## 4 D 4 ## 5 E 1 ## ## [[5]] ## name rank ## 1 A 5 ## 2 B 3 ## 3 C 1 ## 4 D 4 ## 5 E 2
For A, B, C, D and E, we can quite easily calculate the average ranks. To do this, using the sapply command, we can create a
matrix of all the rankings for each data frame with a column for each of the five sets of rankings and a row for each of A
through E:
values <- sapply(data.frames, function(df) {
df$rank
})
row.names(values) <- data.frames[[1]]$name
colnames(values) <- 1:5
## 1 2 3 4 5 ## A 2 4 2 2 5 ## B 3 3 5 5 3 ## C 4 5 1 3 1 ## D 1 2 4 4 4 ## E 5 1 3 1 2
Next, we calculate the mean for each of A, B, C, D and E using the built-in R function rowMeans
:
mean.of.ranks <- rowMeans(values)
## A B C D E ## 3.0 3.8 2.8 3.0 2.4
Finally we use the order
function to get the final rank values and convert the vector back into a data.frame which is of
the same format as the original rank data.frames:
ranks <- order(mean.of.ranks)
avg.rank <- data.frame(name=LETTERS[1:5], rank=ranks)
## name rank ## 1 A 5 ## 2 B 3 ## 3 C 1 ## 4 D 4 ## 5 E 2
I hope this was of use to someone, even if that person happens to a forgetful future me. I'm more than certain that
there is an R function or an R package which will perform this for you but it is nonetheless at most interesting and at
least fun to implement. If anyone has an alternative, more elegant solution, I would really appreciate hearing from you.
Happy hacking!