Transpose Data Frame & Set First Column as Header in R (Example)
In this tutorial, I’ll illustrate how to transpose a data matrix and use the first variable as column names in R.
The article contains one example for the transposing of a data matrix and with the first variable as header. To be more specific, the article will contain these topics:
Let’s dive right in…
Creating Example Data
The following data is used as basement for this R programming language tutorial:
data <- data.frame(head = paste0("x", 1:4), # Create example data row1 = 1:4, row2 = 11:14, row3 = 101:104) data # Print example data |
data <- data.frame(head = paste0("x", 1:4), # Create example data row1 = 1:4, row2 = 11:14, row3 = 101:104) data # Print example data
Table 1 shows that our example data consists of four rows and four columns called “head”, “row1”, “row2”, and “row3”.
Example: Transposing Data Frame & Maintaining First Column as Heading
This section demonstrates how to transpose a data matrix and use the first column of the input data frame as header.
For this task, we can use the t, data.frame, and setNames functions as shown below:
data_t <- setNames(data.frame(t(data[ , - 1])), data[ , 1]) # Transpose data data_t # Print transposed data |
data_t <- setNames(data.frame(t(data[ , - 1])), data[ , 1]) # Transpose data data_t # Print transposed data
As shown in Table 2, the previous R code has created a transposed version of our data with the first variable as column names.
Video, Further Resources & Summary
I have recently released a video on my YouTube channel, which explains the examples of this article. You can find the video below.
Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Besides the video, you may read the related R programming tutorials on my homepage. I have released several articles that are related to the transposing of a data matrix and with the first variable as header already.
- Move Column to First Position of Data Frame
- Extract Single Column as Data Frame
- Set Row & Column Names of Data with Unknown Dimension
- R Programming Examples
In summary: In this R tutorial you have learned how to rotate a data frame and keep the first variable as column names. In case you have additional questions, please let me know in the comments.
Statistics Globe Newsletter