Apply several summary functions (sum, mean, etc.) on several variables by group in one call
aggregate, r, r-faq
Solution
You can do it all in one step and get proper labeling:
> aggregate(. ~ id1+id2, data = x, FUN = function(x) c(mn = mean(x), n = length(x) ) )
# id1 id2 val1.mn val1.n val2.mn val2.n
# 1 a x 1.5 2.0 6.5 2.0
# 2 b x 2.0 2.0 8.0 2.0
# 3 a y 3.5 2.0 7.0 2.0
# 4 b y 3.0 2.0 6.0 2.0
This creates a dataframe with two id columns and two matrix columns:
str( aggregate(. ~ id1+id2, data = x, FUN = function(x) c(mn = mean(x), n = length(x) ) ) )
'data.frame': 4 obs. of 4 variables:
$ id1 : Factor w/ 2 levels "a","b": 1 2 1 2
$ id2 : Factor w/ 2 levels "x","y": 1 1 2 2
$ val1: num [1:4, 1:2] 1.5 2 3.5 3 2 2 2 2
..- attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2
.. ..$ : NULL
.. ..$ : chr "mn" "n"
$ val2: num [1:4, 1:2] 6.5 8 7 6 2 2 2 2
..- attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2
.. ..$ : NULL
.. ..$ : chr "mn" "n"
As pointed out by @lord.garbage below, this can be converted to a dataframe with "simple" columns by using `do.call(data.frame, ...)`
str( do.call(data.frame, aggregate(. ~ id1+id2, data = x, FUN = function(x) c(mn = mean(x), n = length(x) ) ) )
)
'data.frame': 4 obs. of 6 variables:
$ id1 : Factor w/ 2 levels "a","b": 1 2 1 2
$ id2 : Factor w/ 2 levels "x","y": 1 1 2 2
$ val1.mn: num 1.5 2 3.5 3
$ val1.n : num 2 2 2 2
$ val2.mn: num 6.5 8 7 6
$ val2.n : num 2 2 2 2
This is the syntax for multiple variables on the LHS:
aggregate(cbind(val1, val2) ~ id1 + id2, data = x, FUN = function(x) c(mn = mean(x), n = length(x) ) )
Problem
I have the following data frame ``` x <- read.table(text = " id1 id2 val1 val2 1 a x 1 9 2 a x 2 4 3 a y 3 5 4 a y 4 9 5 b x 1 7 6 b y 4 4 7 b x 3 9 8 b y 2 8", header = TRUE) ``` I want to calculate the mean of val1 and val2 grouped by id1 and id2, and simultaneously count the number of rows for each id1-id2 combination. I can perform each calculation separately: ``` # calculate mean aggregate(. ~ id1 + id2, data = x, FUN = mean) # count rows aggregate(. ~ id1 + id2, data = x, FUN = length) ``` In order to do both calculations in one call, I tried ``` do.call("rbind", aggregate(. ~ id1 + id2, data = x, FUN = function(x) data.frame(m = mean(x), n = length(x)))) ``` However, I get a garbled output along with a warning: ``` # m n # id1 1 2 # id2 1 1 # 1.5 2 # 2 2 # 3.5 2 # 3 2 # 6.5 2 # 8 2 # 7 2 # 6 2 # Warning message: # In rbind(id1 = c(1L, 2L, 1L, 2L), id2 = c(1L, 1L, 2L, 2L), val1 = list( : # number of columns of result is not a multiple of vector length (arg 1) ``` I could use the plyr package, but my data set is quite large and plyr is very slow (almost unusable) when the size of the dataset grows. How can I use `aggregate` or other functions to perform several calculations in one call?