prev next front |1 |2 |3 |4 |5 |6 |7 |8 |9 |10 |11 |12 |13 |14 |15 |16 |17 |18 |19 |20 |21 |22 |23 |24 |25 |26 |27 |28 |29 |30 |31 |32 |33 |review
Loosely, this figure shows an organization of data structures in R. Vectors are one dimensional, for instance names, matrix are two dimensional, for instance simple time series. List is a combination of different types of data, for instance an object like a regression output coerced into a single dimension, and a data frame is one like a large dataset. Thus, each column in a datset is an example of a vector. A row in a large dataset is an example of a list.

*One can have "mixed", often called non-atomic in R, matrices such as:
matrix(list(1,"a",1+2i,TRUE),2,2)
[Source: Grothendiek, G (personal communication)]