Consider the following reproducible example: # note that lh is a standard ts dataset that ships with R lh# fit an R model   ar.mle<-ar(lh,method=mle)# now get the min AIC, this is the relevant line:ar.mle$aic[ar.mle$aic==min(ar.mle$aic)]This works fine and gives back the smallest AIC value and it's index, which is the suggested AR order. I feel I am repeating myself in this last line of code. Is there an easier way to obtain index and value? I know I could use partial autocorrelations to determine the level, too. This is not a stats question, but an R indexing question. 
Is there a better way to get the index of a minimum?
r
perhaps the function which.min() would do the trick?which.min(ar.mle$aic)it won't shorten your code all that much:ar.mle$aic[which.min(ar.mle$aic)]