How to assign a name to lat-long observations base

问题:

I have two dataframes: df1 contains observations with lat-lon coordinates; df2 has names with lat-lon coordinates. I want to create a new variable df1$name which has for each observation the name of df2 that has the shortest distance to that observation.

Some sample data for df1:

df1 <- structure(list(lat = c(52.768, 53.155, 53.238, 53.253, 53.312, 53.21, 53.21, 53.109, 53.376, 53.317, 52.972, 53.337, 53.208, 53.278, 53.316, 53.288, 53.341, 52.945, 53.317, 53.249), lon = c(6.873, 6.82, 6.81, 6.82, 6.84, 6.748, 6.743, 6.855, 6.742, 6.808, 6.588, 6.743, 6.752, 6.845, 6.638, 6.872, 6.713, 6.57, 6.735, 6.917), cat = c(2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 3L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L), diff = c(6.97305555555555, 3.39815972222222, 14.2874305555556, -0.759791666666667, 34.448275462963, 4.38783564814815, 0.142430555555556, 0.698599537037037, 1.22914351851852, 7.0008912037037, 1.3349537037037, 8.67978009259259, 1.6090162037037,    25.9466782407407, 9.45068287037037, 4.76284722222222, 1.79163194444444, 16.8280787037037, 1.01336805555556, 3.51240740740741)), .Names = c("lat", "lon", "cat", "diff"), row.names = c(125L, 705L, 435L, 682L, 186L, 783L, 250L, 517L, 547L, 369L, 618L, 280L, 839L, 614L, 371L, 786L, 542L, 100L, 667L, 785L), class = "data.frame")

Some sample data for df2:

df2 <- structure(list(latlonloc = structure(c(6L, 3L, 4L, 2L, 5L, 1L), .Label = c("Boelenslaan", "Borgercompagnie", "Froombosch", "Garrelsweer", "Stitswerd", "Tinallinge"), class = "factor"), lat = c(53.356789, 53.193886, 53.311237, 53.111339, 53.360848, 53.162031), lon = c(6.53493, 6.780792, 6.768608, 6.82354, 6.599604, 6.143804)), .Names = c("latlonloc", "lat", "lon"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -6L))

Based on this answer, I created a distance matrix with the geosphere package:

library(geosphere)
mat <- distm(df1[,c('lon','lat')], df2[,c('lon','lat')], fun=distHaversine)

But how do I pick the shortest distance for each observation and assign the corresponding name to df1$name?

回答1:

Like this:

df1$name <- df2$latlonloc[apply(mat, 1, which.min)]