Some Common Functions

Abstract

This chapter covers some common functions in R. The first section discusses the options() function, which sets the default options for R. The second section describes the round(), signif(), and noquote() functions, which are used in formatting objects. The third section discusses the format(), print(), and plot() functions for displaying objects. The functions in the third section operate differently on different classes of objects, so they are generic functions. The fourth section goes over the eval(), attributes(), attr(), and summary() functions. The functions return evaluated expressions, the attributes of an object, a specific attribute of an object, and a summary of the contents of an object, respectively. The eval() and summary() functions are generic functions, but eval() has just one method. The fifth section introduces the deriv(), numericDeriv(), and integrate() functions. The functions take derivatives of or integrate numeric vectors. The parse() and deparse() functions are covered in the sixth section. The functions read and return text and attempt to interpret the text as R language. In the seventh section, we cover the anova(), coef(), effects(), residuals(), fitted(), vcov(), confint(), and predict() functions. The functions operate specifically on models and are generic functions.