base (version 3.5.3)

scale: 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

x

a numeric matrix(like object).

center

either a logical value or numeric-alike vector of length equal to the number of columns of x, where ‘numeric-alike’ means that as.numeric(.) will be applied successfully if is.numeric(.) is not true.

scale

either a logical value or a numeric-alike vector of length equal to the number of columns of x.

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"

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)).)

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

# NOT RUN {
require(stats)
x <- matrix(1:10, ncol = 2)
(centered.x <- scale(x, scale = FALSE))
cov(centered.scaled.x <- scale(x)) # all 1
# }