PRDV420: Introduction to R Programming

As we have already seen informally, matrices can be built up from other vectors and matrices by the functions cbind() and rbind(). Roughly cbind() forms matrices by binding together matrices horizontally, or column-wise, and rbind() vertically, or row-wise.

In the assignment

> X <- cbind(arg_1, arg_2, arg_3, …)

the arguments to cbind() must be either vectors of any length, or matrices with the same column size, that is the same number of rows. The result is a matrix with the concatenated arguments arg_1, arg_2, … forming the columns.

If some of the arguments to cbind() are vectors they may be shorter than the column size of any matrices present, in which case they are cyclically extended to match the matrix column size (or the length of the longest vector if no matrices are given).

The function rbind() does the corresponding operation for rows. In this case any vector argument, possibly cyclically extended, are of course taken as row vectors.

Suppose X1 and X2 have the same number of rows. To combine these by columns into a matrix X, together with an initial column of 1s we can use

> X <- cbind(1, X1, X2)

The result of rbind() or cbind() always has matrix status. Hence cbind(x) and rbind(x) are possibly the simplest ways explicitly to allow the vector x to be treated as a column or row matrix respectively.