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When running a function in R, the “Arguments imply differing number of rows” error occurs when the number of rows in two or more of the arguments passed to the function are not equal. To fix this, make sure that all of the arguments have the same number of rows and columns by either adding or removing rows from the offending objects. Additionally, you can make sure that all objects are of the same data type. This will help ensure that the arguments passed to your function are compatible and have the same number of rows.
One error you may encounter in R is:
arguments imply differing number of rows: 6, 5
This error occurs when you attempt to create a data frame and the number of rows in each column of the data frame is not the same.
The following example shows how to fix this error in practice.
How to Reproduce the Error
Suppose we attempt to create a data frame in R using three vectors:
#define vectors
x1 <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
x2 <- c(8, 8, 8, 7, 5)
y <- c(9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16)
#attempt to create data frame using vectors as columns
df <- data.frame(x1=x1, x2=x2, y=y)
Error in data.frame(x1 = x1, x2 = x2, y = y) :
arguments imply differing number of rows: 6, 5
We receive an error because each vector does not have the same length, so each column in the resulting data frame does not have the same number of rows.
We can verify this by printing the length of each vector:
#print length of each vector
length(x1)
[1] 6
length(x2)
[1] 5
length(y)
[1] 6
We can see that the vector x2 has a length of 5, which does not match the length of vectors x1 and y.
How to Fix the Error
To fix this error, we simply need to make sure that each vector has the same length so that each column in the resulting data frame has the same number of rows.
For example, we could pad the shortest vector with NA values so that each vector has the same length:
#define vectors
x1 <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
x2 <- c(8, 8, 8, 7, 5)
y <- c(9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16)
#pad shortest vector with NA's to have same length as longest vector
length(x2) <- length(y)
#create data frame using vectors as columns
df <- data.frame(x1=x1, x2=x2, y=y)
#view resulting data frame
df
x1 x2 y
1 1 8 9
2 2 8 11
3 3 8 12
4 4 7 13
5 5 5 14
6 6 NA 16
Notice that we don’t receive an error because each column in the resulting data frame has the same number of rows.