Sorting

Making and creating rankings is one of mankind's favorite affairs. These rankings can be useful (best universities in the world), entertaining (most influential movie stars) or pointless (best 007 look-a-like).

In data analysis you can sort your data according to a certain variable in the dataset. In R, this is done with the help of the function order().

order() is a function that gives you the ranked position of each element when it is applied on a variable, such as a vector for example:

a <- c(100, 10, 1000)
order(a)
[1] 2 1 3

10, which is the second element in a, is the smallest element, so 2 comes first in the output of order(a). 100, which is the first element in a is the second smallest element, so 1 comes second in the output of order(a).

This means we can use the output of order(a) to reshuffle a:

a[order(a)]
[1]   10  100 1000