pmin

pmin is a function in the R programming language that returns the element-wise minimum across its numeric vector arguments. It computes the pairwise minima for corresponding elements of the input vectors and automatically recycles shorter vectors to a common length.

In use, pmin takes any number of numeric vectors as its arguments and returns a numeric vector of the same length as the longest input. If an input vector is shorter than others, it is recycled to match the required length. By default, pmin preserves missing values, so if any corresponding position contains NA, the result at that position is NA. Setting na.rm = TRUE ignores NA values when computing minima, provided at least one non-NA value exists at that position.

Common usage includes data preparation and vectorized calculations where multiple measurements must be compared element-wise. For example, pmin(1:4, c(4,3,2,1)) yields c(1, 3, 2, 1). When missing values are present, na.rm = TRUE can yield a usable result, e.g., pmin(c(1, NA, 3), c(2, 2, NA), na.rm = TRUE) results in c(1, 2, 3).

pmin is closely related to pmax, which computes the element-wise maxima. Both functions are part of base R and are commonly used alongside other min/max operations, comparisons, and missing-data handling. For readers using other programming environments, similar element-wise minimum operations exist under different names (for example, numpy.minimum in Python). See also: pmax, min, NA handling.