Convert Vector to Matrix in R (Example)

In this article you’ll learn how to switch from vector to matrix class in R programming.

The content of the page looks as follows:

With that, let’s get started.

Creation of Example Data

As a first step, we’ll have to create some example data:

vec <- 1:15                     # Create example vector
vec                             # Print example vector
#  [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15

The previous output of the RStudio console shows that our example data is a vector consisting of 15 numeric elements.

Example: Converting Vector to Matrix

In this example, I’ll show how to create a matrix based on our example vector (or array) using the matrix function in R.

Have a look at the following R code:

mat <- matrix(vec, ncol = 3)    # Convert vector to matrix
mat                             # Print matrix
#      [,1] [,2] [,3]
# [1,]    1    6   11
# [2,]    2    7   12
# [3,]    3    8   13
# [4,]    4    9   14
# [5,]    5   10   15

As you can see based on the previous output of the RStudio console, we have created a numeric matrix containing of five rows and three columns.

Video & Further Resources

I have recently released a video on my YouTube channel, which illustrates the R syntax of this page. You can find the video tutorial below:

In addition, you might have a look at some of the other tutorials of this homepage:

• Convert Factor to Character Class
• Multiply Rows of Matrix by Vector in R
• Convert Data Frame Row to Vector
• Convert Matrix to Vector in R
• Introduction to R Programming

In summary: In this R post you learned how to convert and reshape a vector to a matrix with multiple columns. Let me know in the comments below, if you have additional comments and/or questions.