R - Summary

About

summary is a generic function used to produce result summaries of the results of various model fitting functions.

The function invokes particular methods which depend on the class of the object (ie first argument).

x = rnorm(50,5,4)
xSummary <- summary(x)
xSummary

Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
 -4.963   3.434   5.706   5.800   8.119  16.140

For a data frame, you got to see the following for each variable:

exportFile <- file("C:/temp/Myfile.tsv",open="w")
write.table(xSummary, sep="\t") 
close(exportFile)

psych package

# Load packages
library(psych)

# You can save the content of this function
mySummaryTable = describe(myData)

The describeBy function reports basic summary statistics by a grouping variable.

Useful if:

Partly a wrapper of the describe function.

An alternative function statsBy returns a list of means, n, and standard deviations for each group.

statsBy is an alternative function an describeBy that returns a list of:

for each group.

See also: R - Dplyr (Data Frame Operations) and the summarize function.