What Is Difference Between Dataframe and List in R

How do I make a list of data frames?

This isn't related to your question, but you want to use = and not <- within the function call. If you use <-, you'll end up creating variables y1 and y2 in whatever environment you're working in:

d1 <- data.frame(y1 <- c(1, 2, 3), y2 <- c(4, 5, 6))
y1
# [1] 1 2 3
y2
# [1] 4 5 6

This won't have the seemingly desired effect of creating column names in the data frame:

d1
#   y1....c.1..2..3. y2....c.4..5..6.
# 1                1                4
# 2                2                5
# 3                3                6

The = operator, on the other hand, will associate your vectors with arguments to data.frame.

As for your question, making a list of data frames is easy:

d1 <- data.frame(y1 = c(1, 2, 3), y2 = c(4, 5, 6))
d2 <- data.frame(y1 = c(3, 2, 1), y2 = c(6, 5, 4))
my.list <- list(d1, d2)

You access the data frames just like you would access any other list element:

my.list[[1]]
#   y1 y2
# 1  1  4
# 2  2  5
# 3  3  6

Correlations between dataframe and list of dataframes in R

You could use lapply in combination with mapply to apply cor.test and extract a specific value from the test. For example, to get p.value and estimate we can do

lapply(2:4, function(i)  mapply(function(x, y) {
       a <- cor.test(x, y, method = "spearman")
       c(setNames(a$p.value, "pvalue"), a$estimate)
}, lapply(df2, "[[", i), df1[i]))

Convert a list to a data frame

Update July 2020:

The default for the parameter stringsAsFactors is now default.stringsAsFactors() which in turn yields FALSE as its default.

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Assuming your list of lists is called l:

df <- data.frame(matrix(unlist(l), nrow=length(l), byrow=TRUE))

The above will convert all character columns to factors, to avoid this you can add a parameter to the data.frame() call:

df <- data.frame(matrix(unlist(l), nrow=132, byrow=TRUE),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

How to subset a list of data.frames?

If we want to subset the list elements based on names

mainlist_new <- lapply(mainlist, `[`, c("rainfall", "yield"))

-output

> str(mainlist_new)
List of 2
 $ :List of 2
  ..$ rainfall:'data.frame':    5 obs. of  3 variables:
  .. ..$ station : chr [1:5] "MADA1" "MADA2" "MADA3" "MADA4" ...
  .. ..$ rainfall: num [1:5] 0 5 10 15 20
  .. ..$ yield   : num [1:5] 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000
  ..$ yield   :'data.frame':    5 obs. of  3 variables:
  .. ..$ station : chr [1:5] "MADA1" "MADA2" "MADA3" "MADA4" ...
  .. ..$ rainfall: num [1:5] 0 5 10 15 20
  .. ..$ yield   : num [1:5] 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000
 $ :List of 2
  ..$ rainfall:'data.frame':    5 obs. of  3 variables:
  .. ..$ station : chr [1:5] "MADA1" "MADA2" "MADA3" "MADA4" ...
  .. ..$ rainfall: num [1:5] 0 5 10 15 20
  .. ..$ yield   : num [1:5] 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000
  ..$ yield   :'data.frame':    5 obs. of  3 variables:
  .. ..$ station : chr [1:5] "MADA1" "MADA2" "MADA3" "MADA4" ...
  .. ..$ rainfall: num [1:5] 0 5 10 15 20
  .. ..$ yield   : num [1:5] 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000

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