So just write a function that directly computes the quantile, then directly applies clipping to each column. The <-
conditional assignment inside your lapply call is bogus; you want ifelse
to return a vectorized expression for the entire column, already. ifelse
is your friend, for vectorization.
# Make up some dummy df2 output (it's supposed to have 1000 cols really)
df2 <- data.frame(d=runif(1000), e=rnorm(1000), f=runif(1000))
require(plyr)
print(colwise(summary)(df2)) # show the summary before we clamp...
# Compute quantiles on df1...
df1 <- df
df1.quantiles <- apply(df1, 2, function(x, prob=0.9) { quantile(x, prob, names=F) })
# ...now clamp by sweeping col-index across both quantile vector, and df2 cols
clamp <- function(x, xmax) { ifelse(x<=xmax, x, xmax) }
for (j in 1:ncol(df2)) {
df2[,j] <- clamp(df2[,j], df1.quantiles[j]) # don't know how to use apply(...,2,)
}
print(colwise(summary)(df2)) # show the summary after we clamp...
Reference: [1] "Clip values between a minimum and maximum allowed value in R"