Anonymous functions in R Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using Anonymous Functions in R

📖 Scenario: You are working with a list of numbers representing daily sales in a small shop. You want to quickly calculate the square of each sale amount without creating a separate named function.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to use anonymous functions in R to apply a quick calculation to each item in a list.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a numeric vector called sales with the exact values: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50

Create a variable called square_sales that uses lapply() with an anonymous function to square each number in sales

Print the square_sales variable to display the squared values

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Anonymous functions help quickly perform small tasks like calculations or filtering without cluttering your code with many named functions.

💼 Career

Data analysts and programmers often use anonymous functions to write concise and readable code for data transformations and analysis.

1

Create the sales data

Create a numeric vector called sales with these exact values: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50

R Programming

# Create the sales vector with the values 10, 20, 30, 40, 50
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the c() function to create a vector with the given numbers.

2

Prepare to square the sales

Create a variable called square_sales and set it to lapply() applied on sales with an anonymous function that takes one argument and returns its square.

R Programming

sales <- c(10, 20, 30, 40, 50)
# Use lapply with an anonymous function to square each sale
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use function(x) x^2 inside lapply() to square each element.

3

Check the type of the result

Convert square_sales from a list to a numeric vector using unlist() and store it back in square_sales.

R Programming

sales <- c(10, 20, 30, 40, 50)
square_sales <- lapply(sales, function(x) x^2)
# Convert square_sales to a numeric vector
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use unlist() to convert the list to a vector for easier use.

4

Display the squared sales

Print the square_sales vector to show the squared sales values.

R Programming

sales <- c(10, 20, 30, 40, 50)
square_sales <- lapply(sales, function(x) x^2)
square_sales <- unlist(square_sales)
# Print the squared sales
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(square_sales) to display the vector.