Vector recycling behavior in R Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Vector Recycling Behavior

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are working with two sets of numbers representing daily sales and daily targets for a small shop. Sometimes, the number of sales days and target days don't match. R helps by repeating the shorter vector to match the longer one. This is called vector recycling.

🎯 Goal: You will create two vectors with different lengths, set a variable for the length of the longer vector, use vector recycling to add the sales and targets, and finally print the result.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a numeric vector called sales with values 10, 20, 30, 40

Create a numeric vector called targets with values 5, 15

Create a variable called length_long that stores the length of the longer vector between sales and targets

Create a vector called total that adds sales and targets using vector recycling

Print the total vector

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Vector recycling helps when working with data sets of different lengths, like sales data and targets, making calculations easier without manual repetition.

💼 Career

Understanding vector recycling is important for data analysis and programming in R, common in data science and statistics jobs.

1

Create the sales and targets vectors

Create a numeric vector called sales with values 10, 20, 30, 40 and a numeric vector called targets with values 5, 15.

R Programming

# Create the sales and targets vectors
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the c() function to create vectors in R.

2

Find the length of the longer vector

Create a variable called length_long that stores the length of the longer vector between sales and targets using the max() and length() functions.

R Programming

sales <- c(10, 20, 30, 40)
targets <- c(5, 15)
# Create length_long to store the length of the longer vector
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use length() to get vector length and max() to find the bigger number.

3

Add sales and targets using vector recycling

Create a vector called total that adds sales and targets using vector recycling. Use the rep() function to repeat the shorter vector to match length_long.

R Programming

sales <- c(10, 20, 30, 40)
targets <- c(5, 15)
length_long <- max(length(sales), length(targets))
# Create total by adding sales and recycled targets
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use rep(targets, length.out = length_long) to repeat targets to the needed length.

4

Print the total vector

Print the total vector using the print() function.

R Programming

sales <- c(10, 20, 30, 40)
targets <- c(5, 15)
length_long <- max(length(sales), length(targets))
total <- sales + rep(targets, length.out = length_long)
# Print the total vector
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(total) to show the result.