Calculate Square in R (4 Examples)
This tutorial shows how to raise the values of a data object to the power of two in the R programming language.
Table of contents:
Let’s dive right in.
Example 1: Compute Square of Single Value
This example illustrates how to calculate the square of a single data value in R.
x <- 5 # Create data object x # Print data object # 5
As you can see based on the previous output of the RStudio console, we’ll use the value 5 for this example.
Now, we can calculate the square of this data object by using the ^ symbol:
x^2 # Calculate square of data object # 25
The RStudio console shows the result: The square of 5 is equal to 25.
Example 2: Compute Square of Vector Using ^
In this example, I’ll illustrate how to raise all elements of a vector to the power of two. First, we have to create a vector in R:
my_vec <- 1:5 # Create vector my_vec # Print vector # 1 2 3 4 5
Now, we can simply apply the ^ symbol to this vector as we already did in Example 1:
my_vec^2 # Calculate square of vector # 1 4 9 16 25
The output is another vector containing the square of each element of our input vector.
Example 3: Compute Square of Vector Using *
This example explains shows an alternative way for the computation of squares in R.
Instead of the ^ symbol, we can also multiply our data by itself by using the * symbol:
my_vec * my_vec # Multiply vector by itself # 1 4 9 16 25
The output is exactly the same as in Example 2.
Example 4: Compute Square of Data Frame
In this example, I’ll show how to take the square of all elements in a numeric data frame. Let’s create some example data:
my_data <- data.frame(x1 = 3:6, # Create data frame x2 = 5:2, x3 = 4) my_data # Print data frame # x1 x2 x3 # 1 3 5 4 # 2 4 4 4 # 3 5 3 4 # 4 6 2 4
Now, we can basically apply the same R code to our data frame as we already did in Examples 1 & 2 (i.e. ^2):
my_data^2 # Calculate square of data frame # x1 x2 x3 # 1 9 25 16 # 2 16 16 16 # 3 25 9 16 # 4 36 4 16
Looks good!
Video, Further Resources & Summary
Do you need further info on the contents of this page? Then I can recommend to watch the following video of my YouTube channel. I’m explaining the R codes of this page in the video tutorial.
Furthermore, you may read the related tutorials on my website:
Summary: This post illustrated how to take the square of a data object in the R programming language. In case you have further questions, let me know in the comments.