sign Function in R (Example)

In this R tutorial you’ll learn how to find out if a numeric value is positive or negative.

The post looks as follows:

Here’s how to do it.

Definition & Basic R Syntax of sign Function

Definition: The sign R function returns the signs of numeric elements. The value 1 is returned for positive numbers, the value 0 is returned for zero, and the value -1 is returned for negative numbers.

Basic R Syntax: You can find the basic R programming syntax of the sign function below.

sign(5)           # Basic R syntax of sign function

In the remaining tutorial, I’ll illustrate in an example how to apply the sign function in the R programming language.

Example: Return whether Number is Positive or Negative

The R programming syntax below illustrates how to use the sign() command in the R programming language. Within the sign function, we simply need to specify a vector of numeric values:

sign(-2:5)        # Apply sign function
# -1 -1  0  1  1  1  1  1

The first two elements of our vector are negative (indicated by -1), the third element is zero (indicated by 0), and the remaining elements are positive (indicated by +1).

Video & Further Resources

Would you like to know more about the sign function? Then you could watch the following video which I have published on my YouTube channel. In the video, I show the content of this post.

Furthermore, you may read the other tutorials which I have published on this homepage.

• How to Calculate an Absolute Value
• Square Root in R
• R Functions List (+ Examples)
• The R Programming Language

In summary: In this article you learned how to apply the sign function in R. In case you have additional questions, please tell me about it in the comments section.