Important: The stats package has been deprecated. Use the superseding package Statistics instead.

The function subtractfrom of the subpackage stats[transform, ...] subtracts from  data the given quantity.

Missing items remain unchanged.

The requested subtraction is applied at each of the boundary points of classes.

If quantity is not numeric, a call to stats[describe, quantity](data) is made to compute it.

This function is useful for comparing the (absolute) dispersion of two lists of data. For example, removing the mean is a good first step in comparing the variation of mid-day temperatures at the North Pole and at some point on the Equator.

The function transform[apply] is more general than the function transform[subtractfrom]. The function transform[divideby] is related to transform[subtractfrom], and is often used in conjunction with it. One may also want to use transform[standardscore] which removes the mean from the given data, then performs a division by the standard deviation.