So, given these vectors, what's the right answer? a <-c(1,2,3) b<-c(2, 3, 4 ,5, 6)
2,2,3 (distance =1) or 2,3,4 (distance=3)? I.e., is recycling of elements allowed or must the pairing be one-one? if the first, then: df <- expand.grid(a,b) df$dist <- with(df, (Var1-Var2)^2 ) head(df[order(df$dist),], min(length(a),length(b)) ) Var1 Var2 dist 2 2 2 0 6 3 3 0 1 1 2 1 -- David Winsemius ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas S. Dye" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2009 10:02:29 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific Subject: [R] pair matching Given two numeric vectors of possibly unequal length, I'd like to pair each element of the shorter vector with an element of the longer vector such that the sum of squared differences between the pairs is minimized. Can someone point me to an R function or an algorithm for accomplishing this? All the best, Tom Thomas S. Dye, Ph.D. T. S. Dye & Colleagues, Archaeologists, Inc. Phone: (808) 529-0866 Fax: (808) 529-0884 http://www.tsdye.com [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
