R How to Find Column Name with Highest Value in Each Row (Example Code)
On this page, I’ll show how to identify the highest numbers within each line of a data frame in the R programming language.
Creation of Example Data
data(iris) # Load data iris_updated <- iris[ , 1:4] # Remove factor variables from data head(iris_updated) # Head of data # Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species # 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa # 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa # 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa # 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa # 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa # 6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosa |
data(iris) # Load data iris_updated <- iris[ , 1:4] # Remove factor variables from data head(iris_updated) # Head of data # Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species # 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa # 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa # 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa # 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa # 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa # 6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosa
Example: Applying colnames & max.col Functions to Find Colnames with Highest Values in Row
colnames(iris_updated)[max.col(iris_updated, ties.method = "first")] # Using colnames & max.col # [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length"... |
colnames(iris_updated)[max.col(iris_updated, ties.method = "first")] # Using colnames & max.col # [1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Length"...