Calculate row means on subset of columns

Question

Given a sample data frame:

C1<-c(3,2,4,4,5) C2<-c(3,7,3,4,5) C3<-c(5,4,3,6,3) DF<-data.frame(ID=c("A","B","C","D","E"),C1=C1,C2=C2,C3=C3)  DF     ID C1 C2 C3   1  A  3  3  5   2  B  2  7  4   3  C  4  3  3   4  D  4  4  6   5  E  5  5  3 

What is the best way to create a second data frame that would contain the ID column and the mean of each row? Something like this:

ID  Mean A    3.66 B    4.33 C    3.33 D    4.66 E    4.33 

Something similar to:

RM<-rowMeans(DF[,2:4]) 

I'd like to keep the means aligned with their ID's.

Answer 1

Calculate row means on a subset of columns:

Create a new data.frame which specifies the first column from DF as an column called ID and calculates the mean of all the other fields on that row, and puts that into column entitled 'Means':

data.frame(ID=DF[,1], Means=rowMeans(DF[,-1]))   ID    Means 1  A 3.666667 2  B 4.333333 3  C 3.333333 4  D 4.666667 5  E 4.333333