Divide One Column of Data Frame Through Another in R (2 Examples)

This tutorial shows how to divide one column of a data frame through another column of this data frame in R.

The content looks as follows:

1) Creation of Example Data

2) Example 1: Divide First Data Frame Column Through Second

3) Example 2: Add Results of Division as New Variable to Data Frame

4) Video, Further Resources & Summary

Let’s dig in!

Creation of Example Data

The first step is to define some example data:

data <- data.frame(x1 = 2:6,                    # Creating example data
                   x2 = 9:5)
data                                            # Printing example data

table 1 data frame divide one column data frame through another r

Table 1 shows that our example data is made up of five rows and two variables.

Example 1: Divide First Data Frame Column Through Second

The R syntax below illustrates how to divide the values of two different columns of our data frame.

For this, we have to use the $ operator to get the values of each of the two columns, and we have to apply the / operator to perform a division:

data$x1 / data$x2                               # Dividing column vectors
# [1] 0.2222222 0.3750000 0.5714286 0.8333333 1.2000000

The previous output shows our result: five values that correspond to the element-wise division of our two variables.

Example 2: Add Results of Division as New Variable to Data Frame

In Example 2, I’ll illustrate how to add the result of dividing two columns as a new variable to a data frame.

Consider the following R syntax:

data_new <- data                                # Replicating data
data_new$divide <- data_new$x1 / data_new$x2    # Creating new variable
data_new                                        # Printing new data

table 2 data frame divide one column data frame through another r

As illustrated in Table 2, we have created a new column containing the results of our division with the previous R programming code.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. In the video, I illustrate the topics of this tutorial in RStudio:

The YouTube video will be added soon.

In addition, you might want to have a look at the other R programming articles of this website. A selection of articles is shown below:

At this point you should have learned how to divide columns in the R programming language. If you have any additional questions, let me know in the comments below.