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Refer to columns by number in := assignment when using data.table

Submitted by Ina on May 25, 2012

As per Row wise matrix operations in R I would like to apply a row-wise function on a data.table I have. I wish to calculate, per row, the mean of a number of columns in that row. My current attempt is:

columns <- c(1,5,10,15,20) # Actually obtained via grep
my.data.table[,"average" := mean(columns),with=FALSE] # Or...
my.data.table[,average := mean(columns)]

This, unfortunately, simply returns the mean of the 'columns' vector rather than mean of the columns to which they refer. Is there a way to refer to these columns by number?

Here's the average I'm trying to achieve:

key  a b c average
A    5 5 5 5
B    1 2 3 2
C    2 4 9 5