Scaling and Centering of Matrix-like Objects

Description

scale is generic function whose default method centers and/or scales the columns of a numeric matrix.

Usage

scale(x, center = TRUE, scale = TRUE)

Arguments

Details

The value of center determines how column centering is performed. If center is a numeric-alike vector with length equal to the number of columns of x, then each column of x has the corresponding value from center subtracted from it. If center is TRUE then centering is done by subtracting the column means (omitting NAs) of x from their corresponding columns, and if center is FALSE, no centering is done.

The value of scale determines how column scaling is performed (after centering). If scale is a numeric-alike vector with length equal to the number of columns of x, then each column of x is divided by the corresponding value from scale. If scale is TRUE then scaling is done by dividing the (centered) columns of x by their standard deviations if center is TRUE, and the root mean square otherwise. If scale is FALSE, no scaling is done.

The root-mean-square for a (possibly centered) column is defined as sqrt(sum(x^2)/(n-1)), where x is a vector of the non-missing values and n is the number of non-missing values. In the case center = TRUE, this is the same as the standard deviation, but in general it is not. (To scale by the standard deviations without centering, use scale(x, center = FALSE, scale = apply(x, 2, sd, na.rm = TRUE)).)

Value

For scale.default, the centered, scaled matrix. The numeric centering and scalings used (if any) are returned as attributes "scaled:center" and "scaled:scale"

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

sweep which allows centering (and scaling) with arbitrary statistics.

For working with the scale of a plot, see par.

Examples

require(stats)
x <- matrix(1:10, ncol = 2)
(centered.x <- scale(x, scale = FALSE))
cov(centered.scaled.x <- scale(x)) # all 1