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POFunction for median similar to "which.max" and "which.min" / Extracting median rows from a data.frame
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copied!<p>I occasionally need to extract specific rows from a data.frame based on values from one of the variables. <code>R</code> has built-in functions for maximum (<code>which.max()</code>) and minimum (<code>which.min()</code>) that allow me to easily extract those rows.</p> <p>Is there an equivalent for median? Or is my best bet to just write my own function?</p> <p>Here's an example data.frame and how I would use <code>which.max()</code> and <code>which.min()</code>:</p> <pre><code>set.seed(1) # so you can reproduce this example dat = data.frame(V1 = 1:10, V2 = rnorm(10), V3 = rnorm(10), V4 = sample(1:20, 10, replace=T)) # To return the first row, which contains the max value in V4 dat[which.max(dat$V4), ] # To return the seventh row, which contains the min value in V4 dat[which.min(dat$V4), ] </code></pre> <p>For this particular example, since there are an even number of observations, I would need to have two rows returned, in this case, rows 2 and 10.</p> <h2>Update</h2> <p>It would seem that there is not a built-in function for this. As such, using the <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/10256589/1270695">reply from Sacha</a> as a starting point, I wrote this function:</p> <pre><code>which.median = function(x) { if (length(x) %% 2 != 0) { which(x == median(x)) } else if (length(x) %% 2 == 0) { a = sort(x)[c(length(x)/2, length(x)/2+1)] c(which(x == a[1]), which(x == a[2])) } } </code></pre> <p>I'm able to use it as follows:</p> <pre><code># make one data.frame with an odd number of rows dat2 = dat[-10, ] # Median rows from 'dat' (even number of rows) and 'dat2' (odd number of rows) dat[which.median(dat$V4), ] dat2[which.median(dat2$V4), ] </code></pre> <p>Are there any suggestions to improve this?</p>

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