Vector Equality in R Programming

 

In R, vector equality is a comparison operation that is used to check whether two vectors are equal or not. The comparison is performed element-wise, and a logical vector is returned indicating whether each pair of elements is equal or not.

Vector equality is an important concept in R programming, and it is used in many different applications, such as checking for errors in data entry, comparing model predictions to actual data, and testing statistical hypotheses.

Ø   There are two types of vector equality checks in R programming:

element-wise (==)  and overall equality - (.identical())

A. Element-wise equality is the comparison of each element of two vectors. The == operator is used to perform an element-wise comparison of two vectors, and it returns a logical vector indicating whether each element in the first vector is equal to the corresponding element in the second vector.

Syntax:        vector1 == vector2

Parameters:

l    vector1: The first vector to be compared

l    vector2: The second vector to be compared

Example:

# Create two vectors

x <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

y <- c(1, 2, 6, 4, 5)

# Check for element-wise equality

x == y

Output:

[1]  TRUE  TRUE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE

In this example, we create two vectors x and y and check for element-wise equality between them. The resulting vector contains TRUE for the elements that are equal and FALSE for the elements that are not equal.

B. Overall equality is the comparison of the entire vectors to check if they are exactly the same. The identical() function is used to check the overall equality of two vectors, and it returns a logical value indicating whether the two vectors are identical or not.

Syntax:      identical(vector1, vector2)

Parameters:

l    vector1: The first vector to be compared

l    vector2: The second vector to be compared

Example:

# Create two vectors

x <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

y <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

# Check for overall equality

identical(x, y)

Output:

[1] TRUE

In this example, we create two vectors x and y and check for overall equality between them. Since the two vectors contain the same elements in the same order, the identical() function returns TRUE.