Multiply rows of matrix by vector?

Question

I have a numeric matrix with 25 columns and 23 rows, and a vector of length 25. How can I multiply each row of the matrix by the vector without using a for loop?

The result should be a 25x23 matrix (the same size as the input), but each row has been multiplied by the vector.

matrix <- matrix(rep(1:3,each=5),nrow=3,ncol=5,byrow=TRUE)

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]

[1,]    1    1    1    1    1

[2,]    2    2    2    2    2

[3,]    3    3    3    3    3

vector <- 1:5

Desired output:

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]

[1,]    1    2    3    4    5

[2,]    2    4    6    8   10

[3,]    3    6    9   12   15

Answer 1

To multiply rows of a matrix by a vector, you can use the sweep() function from the base package as follows:

mat <- matrix(rep(1:3,each=5),nrow=3,ncol=5,byrow=TRUE)

 mat

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]

[1,]    1    1    1    1    1

[2,]    2    2    2    2    2

[3,]    3    3    3    3    3

vec <- 1:5

Use sweep to apply the vector with the multiply (`*`) function across columns where MARGIN is a vector giving the subscripts which the function will be applied over. E.g., for a matrix 1 indicates rows, 2 indicates columns, c(1, 2) indicates rows and columns.i.e.,

> sweep(mat, MARGIN=2, vec, `*`)

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]

[1,]    1    2    3    4    5

[2,]    2    4    6    8   10

[3,]    3    6    9   12   15