finding point of intersection in R

Question

I have 2 vectors:

set.seed(1)
x1 = rnorm(100,0,1)
x2 = rnorm(100,1,1)

I want to plot these as lines and then find the intersection points of the lines, also if there are multiple points of intersection then I want to locate each of them.

I have come across a similar question,and tried to solve this problem using spatstat, but I was not able to convert my combined data frame containing both vector values to psp object.

Answer 1

Late response, but here is a "spatial" method using package SP and RGEOS. This requires that both x and y are numeric (or can be converted to numeric). The projection is arbitrary, but epsg:4269 seemed to work well:

library(sp)
library(rgeos)
# dummy x data
x1 = rnorm(100,0,1)
x2 = rnorm(100,1,1)

#dummy y data 
y1 <- seq(1, 100, 1)
y2 <- seq(1, 100, 1) 

# convert to a sp object (spatial lines)
l1 <- Line(matrix(c(x1, y1), nc = 2, byrow = F))
l2 <- Line(matrix(c(x2, y2), nc = 2, byrow = F))
ll1 <- Lines(list(l1), ID = "1")
ll2 <- Lines(list(l2), ID = "1")
sl1 <- SpatialLines(list(ll1), proj4string = CRS("+init=epsg:4269"))
sl2 <- SpatialLines(list(ll2), proj4string = CRS("+init=epsg:4269"))

# Calculate locations where spatial lines intersect
int.pts <- gIntersection(sl1, sl2, byid = TRUE)
int.coords <- int.pts@coords

# Plot line data and points of intersection
plot(x1, y1, type = "l")
lines(x2, y2, type = "l", col = "red")
points(int.coords[,1], int.coords[,2], pch = 20, col = "blue")