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

maxr

I have the following data frame which I called ozone:

   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

I would like to extract the highest value from ozone, Solar.R, Wind…

Also, if possible how would I sort Solar.R or any column of this data frame in descending order

I tried 

max(ozone, na.rm=T)

which gives me the highest value in the dataset.

I have also tried 

max(subset(ozone,Ozone))

but got "subset" must be logical."

I can set an object to hold the subset of each column, by the following commands

ozone <- subset(ozone, Ozone >0)
max(ozone,na.rm=T)

but it gives the same value of 334, which is the max value of the data frame, not the column.

Any help would be great, thanks.

Best Answer

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
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