means and SD for columns in a dataframe with NA values

Question

I'm trying to calculate the mean and standard deviation of several columns (except the first column) in a data.frame with NA values.

I've tried colMeans, sapply, etc., to create a loop that runs through the data.frame and then stores means and standard deviations in a separate table but keep getting a "FUN" error. any help would be great. Thanks

a

Answer 1

sapply(df, function(cl) list(means=mean(cl,na.rm=TRUE), sds=sd(cl,na.rm=TRUE)))
      col1     col2     col3     col4     col5    
means 3        8        12.5     18.25    22.5    
sds   1.581139 1.581139 1.290994 1.707825 1.290994

as.data.frame( t(sapply(df, function(cl) list(means=mean(cl,na.rm=TRUE), 
                                              sds=sd(cl,na.rm=TRUE))) ))
     means      sds
col1     3 1.581139
col2     8 1.581139
col3  12.5 1.290994
col4 18.25 1.707825
col5  22.5 1.290994