Sum of matrix elements between diagonals efficiently in R

Question

I have data in the form of n*n matrix for which I want to do some computations (e.g. sum) on whose elements placed between diagonals (excluding diagonals).

For example for this matrix:

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
[1,]    2    0    1    4    3
[2,]    5    3    6    0    4
[3,]    3    5    2    3    1
[4,]    2    1    5    3    2
[5,]    1    4    3    4    1

The result for sum (between diagonal elements) would be:

# left slice 5+3+2+5 = 15
# bottom slice 4+3+4+5 = 16
# right slice 4+1+2+3 = 10
# top slice 0+1+4+6 = 11

# dput(m)
m <- structure(c(2, 5, 3, 2, 1, 0, 3, 5, 1, 4, 1, 6, 2, 5, 3, 4, 0, 
3, 3, 4, 3, 4, 1, 2, 1), .Dim = c(5L, 5L))

How to accomplish that efficiently?

Answer 1

Here's how you can get the "top slice":

sum(m[lower.tri(m)[nrow(m):1,] & upper.tri(m)])
#[1] 11

to visualize it:

lower.tri(m)[nrow(m):1,] & upper.tri(m)
#      [,1]  [,2]  [,3]  [,4]  [,5]
#[1,] FALSE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE
#[2,] FALSE FALSE  TRUE FALSE FALSE
#[3,] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE
#[4,] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE
#[5,] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE

---

Here's how you can compute all 4 of the slices:

up <- upper.tri(m)
lo <- lower.tri(m)
n <- nrow(m)

# top
sum(m[lo[n:1,] & up])
# left
sum(m[lo[n:1,] & lo])
# right
sum(m[up[n:1,] & up])
# bottom
sum(m[up[n:1,] & lo])