library(tidyverse) library(nycflights13)
::: status callout-note You are reading the work-in-progress second edition of R for Data Science. This chapter should be readable but is currently undergoing final polishing. You can find the complete first edition at https://r4ds.had.co.nz. :::
In this chapter, you’ll learn tools for working with logical vectors. Logical vectors are the simplest type of vector because each element can only be one of three possible values: TRUE
, FALSE
, and NA
. It’s relatively rare to find logical vectors in your raw data, but you’ll create and manipulate in the course of almost every analysis.
We’ll begin by discussing the most common way of creating logical vectors: with numeric comparisons. Then you’ll learn about how you can use Boolean algebra to combine different logical vectors, as well as some useful summaries. We’ll finish off with if_else()
and case_when()
, two useful functions for making conditional changes powered by logical vectors.
Most of the functions you’ll learn about in this chapter are provided by base R, so we don’t need the tidyverse, but we’ll still load it so we can use mutate()
, filter()
, and friends to work with data frames. We’ll also continue to draw examples from the nycflights13 dataset.
library(tidyverse) library(nycflights13)
However, as we start to cover more tools, there won’t always be a perfect real example. So we’ll start making up some dummy data with c()
:
x <- c(1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13) x * 2 #> [1] 2 4 6 10 14 22 26
This makes it easier to explain individual functions at the cost of making it harder to see how it might apply to your data problems. Just remember that any manipulation we do to a free-floating vector, you can do to a variable inside data frame with mutate()
and friends.
df <- tibble(x) df |> mutate(y = x * 2) #> # A tibble: 7 × 2 #> x y #> <dbl> <dbl> #> 1 1 2 #> 2 2 4 #> 3 3 6 #> 4 5 10 #> 5 7 14 #> 6 11 22 #> # … with 1 more row
A very common way to create a logical vector is via a numeric comparison with <
, <=
, >
, >=
, !=
, and ==
. So far, we’ve mostly created logical variables transiently within filter()
— they are computed, used, and then thrown away. For example, the following filter finds all daytime departures that leave roughly on time:
flights |> filter(dep_time > 600 & dep_time < 2000 & abs(arr_delay) < 20) #> # A tibble: 172,286 × 19 #> year month day dep_time sched_…¹ dep_d…² arr_t…³ sched…⁴ arr_d…⁵ carrier #> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <dbl> <int> <int> <dbl> <chr> #> 1 2013 1 1 601 600 1 844 850 -6 B6 #> 2 2013 1 1 602 610 -8 812 820 -8 DL #> 3 2013 1 1 602 605 -3 821 805 16 MQ #> 4 2013 1 1 606 610 -4 858 910 -12 AA #> 5 2013 1 1 606 610 -4 837 845 -8 DL #> 6 2013 1 1 607 607 0 858 915 -17 UA #> # … with 172,280 more rows, 9 more variables: flight <int>, tailnum <chr>, #> # origin <chr>, dest <chr>, air_time <dbl>, distance <dbl>, hour <dbl>, #> # minute <dbl>, time_hour <dttm>, and abbreviated variable names #> # ¹sched_dep_time, ²dep_delay, ³arr_time, ⁴sched_arr_time, ⁵arr_delay
It’s useful to know that this is a shortcut and you can explicitly create the underlying logical variables with mutate()
:
flights |> mutate( daytime = dep_time > 600 & dep_time < 2000, approx_ontime = abs(arr_delay) < 20, .keep = "used" ) #> # A tibble: 336,776 × 4 #> dep_time arr_delay daytime approx_ontime #> <int> <dbl> <lgl> <lgl> #> 1 517 11 FALSE TRUE #> 2 533 20 FALSE FALSE #> 3 542 33 FALSE FALSE #> 4 544 -18 FALSE TRUE #> 5 554 -25 FALSE FALSE #> 6 554 12 FALSE TRUE #> # … with 336,770 more rows
This is particularly useful for more complicated logic because naming the intermediate steps makes it easier to both read your code and check that each step has been computed correctly.
All up, the initial filter is equivalent to:
flights |> mutate( daytime = dep_time > 600 & dep_time < 2000, approx_ontime = abs(arr_delay) < 20, ) |> filter(daytime & approx_ontime)
Beware of using ==
with numbers. For example, it looks like this vector contains the numbers 1 and 2:
x <- c(1 / 49 * 49, sqrt(2) ^ 2) x #> [1] 1 2
But if you test them for equality, you get FALSE
:
x == c(1, 2) #> [1] FALSE FALSE
What’s going on? Computers store numbers with a fixed number of decimal places so there’s no way to exactly represent 1/49 or sqrt(2)
and subsequent computations will be very slightly off. We can see the exact values by calling print()
with the the digits
R normally calls print for you (i.e. x
is a shortcut for print(x)
), but calling it explicitly is useful if you want to provide other arguments. argument:
print(x, digits = 16) #> [1] 0.9999999999999999 2.0000000000000004
You can see why R defaults to rounding these numbers; they really are very close to what you expect.
Now that you’ve seen why ==
is failing, what can you do about it? One option is to use dplyr::near()
which ignores small differences:
near(x, c(1, 2)) #> [1] TRUE TRUE
Missing values represent the unknown so they are “contagious”: almost any operation involving an unknown value will also be unknown:
NA > 5 #> [1] NA 10 == NA #> [1] NA
The most confusing result is this one:
NA == NA #> [1] NA
It’s easiest to understand why this is true if we artificially supply a little more context:
# Let x be Mary's age. We don't know how old she is. x <- NA # Let y be John's age. We don't know how old he is. y <- NA # Are John and Mary the same age? x == y #> [1] NA # We don't know!
So if you want to find all flights with dep_time
is missing, the following code doesn’t work because dep_time == NA
will yield a NA
for every single row, and filter()
automatically drops missing values:
flights |> filter(dep_time == NA) #> # A tibble: 0 × 19 #> # … with 19 variables: year <int>, month <int>, day <int>, dep_time <int>, #> # sched_dep_time <int>, dep_delay <dbl>, arr_time <int>, #> # sched_arr_time <int>, arr_delay <dbl>, carrier <chr>, flight <int>, #> # tailnum <chr>, origin <chr>, dest <chr>, air_time <dbl>, distance <dbl>, #> # hour <dbl>, minute <dbl>, time_hour <dttm>
Instead we’ll need a new tool: is.na()
.
is.na()
is.na(x)
works with any type of vector and returns TRUE
for missing values and FALSE
for everything else:
is.na(c(TRUE, NA, FALSE)) #> [1] FALSE TRUE FALSE is.na(c(1, NA, 3)) #> [1] FALSE TRUE FALSE is.na(c("a", NA, "b")) #> [1] FALSE TRUE FALSE
We can use is.na()
to find all the rows with a missing dep_time
:
flights |> filter(is.na(dep_time)) #> # A tibble: 8,255 × 19 #> year month day dep_time sched_…¹ dep_d…² arr_t…³ sched…⁴ arr_d…⁵ carrier #> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <dbl> <int> <int> <dbl> <chr> #> 1 2013 1 1 NA 1630 NA NA 1815 NA EV #> 2 2013 1 1 NA 1935 NA NA 2240 NA AA #> 3 2013 1 1 NA 1500 NA NA 1825 NA AA #> 4 2013 1 1 NA 600 NA NA 901 NA B6 #> 5 2013 1 2 NA 1540 NA NA 1747 NA EV #> 6 2013 1 2 NA 1620 NA NA 1746 NA EV #> # … with 8,249 more rows, 9 more variables: flight <int>, tailnum <chr>, #> # origin <chr>, dest <chr>, air_time <dbl>, distance <dbl>, hour <dbl>, #> # minute <dbl>, time_hour <dttm>, and abbreviated variable names #> # ¹sched_dep_time, ²dep_delay, ³arr_time, ⁴sched_arr_time, ⁵arr_delay
is.na()
can also be useful in arrange()
. arrange()
usually puts all the missing values at the end but you can override this default by first sorting by is.na()
:
flights |> filter(month == 1, day == 1) |> arrange(dep_time) #> # A tibble: 842 × 19 #> year month day dep_time sched_…¹ dep_d…² arr_t…³ sched…⁴ arr_d…⁵ carrier #> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <dbl> <int> <int> <dbl> <chr> #> 1 2013 1 1 517 515 2 830 819 11 UA #> 2 2013 1 1 533 529 4 850 830 20 UA #> 3 2013 1 1 542 540 2 923 850 33 AA #> 4 2013 1 1 544 545 -1 1004 1022 -18 B6 #> 5 2013 1 1 554 600 -6 812 837 -25 DL #> 6 2013 1 1 554 558 -4 740 728 12 UA #> # … with 836 more rows, 9 more variables: flight <int>, tailnum <chr>, #> # origin <chr>, dest <chr>, air_time <dbl>, distance <dbl>, hour <dbl>, #> # minute <dbl>, time_hour <dttm>, and abbreviated variable names #> # ¹sched_dep_time, ²dep_delay, ³arr_time, ⁴sched_arr_time, ⁵arr_delay flights |> filter(month == 1, day == 1) |> arrange(desc(is.na(dep_time)), dep_time) #> # A tibble: 842 × 19 #> year month day dep_time sched_…¹ dep_d…² arr_t…³ sched…⁴ arr_d…⁵ carrier #> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <dbl> <int> <int> <dbl> <chr> #> 1 2013 1 1 NA 1630 NA NA 1815 NA EV #> 2 2013 1 1 NA 1935 NA NA 2240 NA AA #> 3 2013 1 1 NA 1500 NA NA 1825 NA AA #> 4 2013 1 1 NA 600 NA NA 901 NA B6 #> 5 2013 1 1 517 515 2 830 819 11 UA #> 6 2013 1 1 533 529 4 850 830 20 UA #> # … with 836 more rows, 9 more variables: flight <int>, tailnum <chr>, #> # origin <chr>, dest <chr>, air_time <dbl>, distance <dbl>, hour <dbl>, #> # minute <dbl>, time_hour <dttm>, and abbreviated variable names #> # ¹sched_dep_time, ²dep_delay, ³arr_time, ⁴sched_arr_time, ⁵arr_delay
We’ll come back to cover missing values in more depth in #chp-missing-values.
dplyr::near()
work? Type near
to see the source code.mutate()
, is.na()
, and count()
together to describe how the missing values in dep_time
, sched_dep_time
and dep_delay
are connected.Once you have multiple logical vectors, you can combine them together using Boolean algebra. In R, &
is “and”, |
is “or”, and !
is “not”, and xor()
is exclusive orThat is, xor(x, y)
is true if x is true, or y is true, but not both. This is how we usually use “or” In English. “Both” is not usually an acceptable answer to the question “would you like ice cream or cake?”.. #fig-bool-ops shows the complete set of Boolean operations and how they work.
x
is the left-hand circle, y
is the right-hand circle, and the shaded region show which parts each operator selects.As well as &
and |
, R also has &&
and ||
. Don’t use them in dplyr functions! These are called short-circuiting operators and only ever return a single TRUE
or FALSE
. They’re important for programming, not data science
The rules for missing values in Boolean algebra are a little tricky to explain because they seem inconsistent at first glance:
df <- tibble(x = c(TRUE, FALSE, NA)) df |> mutate( and = x & NA, or = x | NA ) #> # A tibble: 3 × 3 #> x and or #> <lgl> <lgl> <lgl> #> 1 TRUE NA TRUE #> 2 FALSE FALSE NA #> 3 NA NA NA
To understand what’s going on, think about NA | TRUE
. A missing value in a logical vector means that the value could either be TRUE
or FALSE
. TRUE | TRUE
and FALSE | TRUE
are both TRUE
, so NA | TRUE
must also be TRUE
. Similar reasoning applies with NA & FALSE
.
Note that the order of operations doesn’t work like English. Take the following code finds all flights that departed in November or December:
flights |> filter(month == 11 | month == 12)
You might be tempted to write it like you’d say in English: “find all flights that departed in November or December”:
flights |> filter(month == 11 | 12) #> # A tibble: 336,776 × 19 #> year month day dep_time sched_…¹ dep_d…² arr_t…³ sched…⁴ arr_d…⁵ carrier #> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <dbl> <int> <int> <dbl> <chr> #> 1 2013 1 1 517 515 2 830 819 11 UA #> 2 2013 1 1 533 529 4 850 830 20 UA #> 3 2013 1 1 542 540 2 923 850 33 AA #> 4 2013 1 1 544 545 -1 1004 1022 -18 B6 #> 5 2013 1 1 554 600 -6 812 837 -25 DL #> 6 2013 1 1 554 558 -4 740 728 12 UA #> # … with 336,770 more rows, 9 more variables: flight <int>, tailnum <chr>, #> # origin <chr>, dest <chr>, air_time <dbl>, distance <dbl>, hour <dbl>, #> # minute <dbl>, time_hour <dttm>, and abbreviated variable names #> # ¹sched_dep_time, ²dep_delay, ³arr_time, ⁴sched_arr_time, ⁵arr_delay
This code doesn’t error but it also doesn’t seem to have worked. What’s going on? Here R first evaluates month == 11
creating a logical vector, which we call nov
. It computes nov | 12
. When you use a number with a logical operator it converts everything apart from 0 to TRUE, so this is equivalent to nov | TRUE
which will always be TRUE
, so every row will be selected:
flights |> mutate( nov = month == 11, final = nov | 12, .keep = "used" ) #> # A tibble: 336,776 × 3 #> month nov final #> <int> <lgl> <lgl> #> 1 1 FALSE TRUE #> 2 1 FALSE TRUE #> 3 1 FALSE TRUE #> 4 1 FALSE TRUE #> 5 1 FALSE TRUE #> 6 1 FALSE TRUE #> # … with 336,770 more rows
%in%
An easy way to avoid the problem of getting your ==
s and |
s in the right order is to use %in%
. x %in% y
returns a logical vector the same length as x
that is TRUE
whenever a value in x
is anywhere in y
.
1:12 %in% c(1, 5, 11) #> [1] TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE letters[1:10] %in% c("a", "e", "i", "o", "u") #> [1] TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE
So to find all flights in November and December we could write:
flights |> filter(month %in% c(11, 12))
Note that %in%
obeys different rules for NA
to ==
, as NA %in% NA
is TRUE
.
c(1, 2, NA) == NA #> [1] NA NA NA c(1, 2, NA) %in% NA #> [1] FALSE FALSE TRUE
This can make for a useful shortcut:
flights |> filter(dep_time %in% c(NA, 0800)) #> # A tibble: 8,803 × 19 #> year month day dep_time sched_…¹ dep_d…² arr_t…³ sched…⁴ arr_d…⁵ carrier #> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <dbl> <int> <int> <dbl> <chr> #> 1 2013 1 1 800 800 0 1022 1014 8 DL #> 2 2013 1 1 800 810 -10 949 955 -6 MQ #> 3 2013 1 1 NA 1630 NA NA 1815 NA EV #> 4 2013 1 1 NA 1935 NA NA 2240 NA AA #> 5 2013 1 1 NA 1500 NA NA 1825 NA AA #> 6 2013 1 1 NA 600 NA NA 901 NA B6 #> # … with 8,797 more rows, 9 more variables: flight <int>, tailnum <chr>, #> # origin <chr>, dest <chr>, air_time <dbl>, distance <dbl>, hour <dbl>, #> # minute <dbl>, time_hour <dttm>, and abbreviated variable names #> # ¹sched_dep_time, ²dep_delay, ³arr_time, ⁴sched_arr_time, ⁵arr_delay
arr_delay
is missing but dep_delay
is not. Find all flights where neither arr_time
nor sched_arr_time
are missing, but arr_delay
is.dep_time
? What other variables are missing in these rows? What might these rows represent?dep_time
implies that a flight is cancelled, look at the number of cancelled flights per day. Is there a pattern? Is there a connection between the proportion of cancelled flights and average delay of non-cancelled flights?The following sections describe some useful techniques for summarizing logical vectors. As well as functions that only work specifically with logical vectors, you can also use functions that work with numeric vectors.
There are two main logical summaries: any()
and all()
. any(x)
is the equivalent of |
; it’ll return TRUE
if there are any TRUE
’s in x
. all(x)
is equivalent of &
; it’ll return TRUE
only if all values of x
are TRUE
’s. Like all summary functions, they’ll return NA
if there are any missing values present, and as usual you can make the missing values go away with na.rm = TRUE
.
For example, we could use all()
to find out if there were days where every flight was delayed:
flights |> group_by(year, month, day) |> summarise( all_delayed = all(arr_delay >= 0, na.rm = TRUE), any_delayed = any(arr_delay >= 0, na.rm = TRUE), .groups = "drop" ) #> # A tibble: 365 × 5 #> year month day all_delayed any_delayed #> <int> <int> <int> <lgl> <lgl> #> 1 2013 1 1 FALSE TRUE #> 2 2013 1 2 FALSE TRUE #> 3 2013 1 3 FALSE TRUE #> 4 2013 1 4 FALSE TRUE #> 5 2013 1 5 FALSE TRUE #> 6 2013 1 6 FALSE TRUE #> # … with 359 more rows
In most cases, however, any()
and all()
are a little too crude, and it would be nice to be able to get a little more detail about how many values are TRUE
or FALSE
. That leads us to the numeric summaries.
When you use a logical vector in a numeric context, TRUE
becomes 1 and FALSE
becomes 0. This makes sum()
and mean()
very useful with logical vectors because sum(x)
will give the number of TRUE
s and mean(x)
the proportion of TRUE
s. That lets us see the distribution of delays across the days of the year as shown in #fig-prop-delayed-dist.
flights |> group_by(year, month, day) |> summarise( prop_delayed = mean(arr_delay > 0, na.rm = TRUE), .groups = "drop" ) |> ggplot(aes(prop_delayed)) + geom_histogram(binwidth = 0.05)
Or we could ask how many flights left before 5am, which are often flights that were delayed from the previous day:
flights |> group_by(year, month, day) |> summarise( n_early = sum(dep_time < 500, na.rm = TRUE), .groups = "drop" ) |> arrange(desc(n_early)) #> # A tibble: 365 × 4 #> year month day n_early #> <int> <int> <int> <int> #> 1 2013 6 28 32 #> 2 2013 4 10 30 #> 3 2013 7 28 30 #> 4 2013 3 18 29 #> 5 2013 7 7 29 #> 6 2013 7 10 29 #> # … with 359 more rows
There’s one final use for logical vectors in summaries: you can use a logical vector to filter a single variable to a subset of interest. This makes use of the base [
(pronounced subset) operator, which you’ll learn more about in #sec-subset-many.
Imagine we wanted to look at the average delay just for flights that were actually delayed. One way to do so would be to first filter the flights:
flights |> filter(arr_delay > 0) |> group_by(year, month, day) |> summarise( behind = mean(arr_delay), n = n(), .groups = "drop" ) #> # A tibble: 365 × 5 #> year month day behind n #> <int> <int> <int> <dbl> <int> #> 1 2013 1 1 32.5 461 #> 2 2013 1 2 32.0 535 #> 3 2013 1 3 27.7 460 #> 4 2013 1 4 28.3 297 #> 5 2013 1 5 22.6 238 #> 6 2013 1 6 24.4 381 #> # … with 359 more rows
This works, but what if we wanted to also compute the average delay for flights that arrived early? We’d need to perform a separate filter step, and then figure out how to combine the two data frames togetherWe’ll cover this in #chp-joins]. Instead you could use [
to perform an inline filtering: arr_delay[arr_delay > 0]
will yield only the positive arrival delays.
This leads to:
flights |> group_by(year, month, day) |> summarise( behind = mean(arr_delay[arr_delay > 0], na.rm = TRUE), ahead = mean(arr_delay[arr_delay < 0], na.rm = TRUE), n = n(), .groups = "drop" ) #> # A tibble: 365 × 6 #> year month day behind ahead n #> <int> <int> <int> <dbl> <dbl> <int> #> 1 2013 1 1 32.5 -12.5 842 #> 2 2013 1 2 32.0 -14.3 943 #> 3 2013 1 3 27.7 -18.2 914 #> 4 2013 1 4 28.3 -17.0 915 #> 5 2013 1 5 22.6 -14.0 720 #> 6 2013 1 6 24.4 -13.6 832 #> # … with 359 more rows
Also note the difference in the group size: in the first chunk n()
gives the number of delayed flights per day; in the second, n()
gives the total number of flights.
sum(is.na(x))
tell you? How about mean(is.na(x))
?prod()
return when applied to a logical vector? What logical summary function is it equivalent to? What does min()
return applied to a logical vector? What logical summary function is it equivalent to? Read the documentation and perform a few experiments.One of the most powerful features of logical vectors are their use for conditional transformations, i.e. doing one thing for condition x, and something different for condition y. There are two important tools for this: if_else()
and case_when()
.
if_else()
If you want to use one value when a condition is true and another value when it’s FALSE
, you can use dplyr::if_else()
dplyr’s if_else()
is very similar to base R’s ifelse()
. There are two main advantages of if_else()
over ifelse()
: you can choose what should happen to missing values, and if_else()
is much more likely to give you a meaningful error if you variables have incompatible types.. You’ll always use the first three argument of if_else()
. The first argument, condition
, is a logical vector, the second, true
, gives the output when the condition is true, and the third, false
, gives the output if the condition is false.
Let’s begin with a simple example of labeling a numeric vector as either “+ve” or “-ve”:
x <- c(-3:3, NA) if_else(x > 0, "+ve", "-ve") #> [1] "-ve" "-ve" "-ve" "-ve" "+ve" "+ve" "+ve" NA
There’s an optional fourth argument, missing
which will be used if the input is NA
:
if_else(x > 0, "+ve", "-ve", "???") #> [1] "-ve" "-ve" "-ve" "-ve" "+ve" "+ve" "+ve" "???"
You can also use vectors for the the true
and false
arguments. For example, this allows us to create a minimal implementation of abs()
:
if_else(x < 0, -x, x) #> [1] 3 2 1 0 1 2 3 NA
So far all the arguments have used the same vectors, but you can of course mix and match. For example, you could implement a simple version of coalesce()
like this:
x1 <- c(NA, 1, 2, NA) y1 <- c(3, NA, 4, 6) if_else(is.na(x1), y1, x1) #> [1] 3 1 2 6
You might have noticed a small infelicity in our labeling: zero is neither positive nor negative. We could resolve this by adding an additional if_else()
:
if_else(x == 0, "0", if_else(x < 0, "-ve", "+ve"), "???") #> [1] "-ve" "-ve" "-ve" "0" "+ve" "+ve" "+ve" "???"
This is already a little hard to read, and you can imagine it would only get harder if you have more conditions. Instead, you can switch to dplyr::case_when()
.
case_when()
dplyr’s case_when()
is inspired by SQL’s CASE
statement and provides a flexible way of performing different computations for different computations. It has a special syntax that unfortunately looks like nothing else you’ll use in the tidyverse. It takes pairs that look like condition ~ output
. condition
must be a logical vector; when it’s TRUE
, output
will be used.
This means we could recreate our previous nested if_else()
as follows:
case_when( x == 0 ~ "0", x < 0 ~ "-ve", x > 0 ~ "+ve", is.na(x) ~ "???" ) #> [1] "-ve" "-ve" "-ve" "0" "+ve" "+ve" "+ve" "???"
This is more code, but it’s also more explicit.
To explain how case_when()
works, lets explore some simpler cases. If none of the cases match, the output gets an NA
:
case_when( x < 0 ~ "-ve", x > 0 ~ "+ve" ) #> [1] "-ve" "-ve" "-ve" NA "+ve" "+ve" "+ve" NA
If you want to create a “default”/catch all value, use TRUE
on the left hand side:
case_when( x < 0 ~ "-ve", x > 0 ~ "+ve", TRUE ~ "???" ) #> [1] "-ve" "-ve" "-ve" "???" "+ve" "+ve" "+ve" "???"
And note that if multiple conditions match, only the first will be used:
case_when( x > 0 ~ "+ve", x > 3 ~ "big" ) #> [1] NA NA NA NA "+ve" "+ve" "+ve" NA
Just like with if_else()
you can use variables on both sides of the ~
and you can mix and match variables as needed for your problem. For example, we could use case_when()
to provide some human readable labels for the arrival delay:
flights |> mutate( status = case_when( is.na(arr_delay) ~ "cancelled", arr_delay > 60 ~ "very late", arr_delay > 15 ~ "late", abs(arr_delay) <= 15 ~ "on time", arr_delay < -15 ~ "early", arr_delay < -30 ~ "very early", ), .keep = "used" ) #> # A tibble: 336,776 × 2 #> arr_delay status #> <dbl> <chr> #> 1 11 on time #> 2 20 late #> 3 33 late #> 4 -18 early #> 5 -25 early #> 6 12 on time #> # … with 336,770 more rows
The definition of a logical vector is simple because each value must be either TRUE
, FALSE
, or NA
. But logical vectors provide a huge amount of power. In this chapter, you learned how to create logical vectors with >
, <
, <=
, =>
, ==
, !=
, and is.na()
, how to combine them with !
, &
, and |
, and how to summarize them with any()
, all()
, sum()
, and mean()
. You also learned the powerful if_else()
and case_when()
that allow you to return values depending on the value of a logical vector.
We’ll see logical vectors again and in the following chapters. For example in #chp-strings you’ll learn about str_detect(x, pattern)
which returns a logical vector that’s TRUE
for the elements of x
that match the pattern
, and in #chp-datetimes you’ll create logical vectors from the comparison of dates and times. But for now, we’re going to move onto the next most important type of vector: numeric vectors.