for each group summarise means for all variables in dataframe (ddply? split?)

Question

A week ago I would have done this manually: subset dataframe by group to new dataframes. For each dataframe compute means for each variables, then rbind. very clunky ...

Now i have learned about split and plyr, and I guess there must be an easier way using these tools. Please don't prove me wrong.

test_data <- data.frame(cbind(
var0 = rnorm(100),
var1 = rnorm(100,1),
var2 = rnorm(100,2),
var3 = rnorm(100,3),
var4 = rnorm(100,4),
group = sample(letters[1:10],100,replace=T),
year = sample(c(2007,2009),100, replace=T)))

test_data$var1 <- as.numeric(as.character(test_data$var1))
test_data$var2 <- as.numeric(as.character(test_data$var2))
test_data$var3 <- as.numeric(as.character(test_data$var3))
test_data$var4 <- as.numeric(as.character(test_data$var4))

I am toying with both ddply but I can't produce what I desire - i.e. a table like this, for each group

group a |2007|2009|
________|____|____|
var1    | xx | xx |
var2    | xx | xx |
etc.    | etc| ect|

maybe d_ply and some odfweave output would work to. Inputs are very much appreciated.

p.s. I notice that data.frame converts the rnorm to factors in my data.frame? how can I avoid this - I(rnorm(100) doesn't work so I have to convert to numerics as done above

Answer 1

Given the format you want for the result, the reshape package will be more efficient than plyr.

test_data <- data.frame(
var0 = rnorm(100),
var1 = rnorm(100,1),
var2 = rnorm(100,2),
var3 = rnorm(100,3),
var4 = rnorm(100,4),
group = sample(letters[1:10],100,replace=T),
year = sample(c(2007,2009),100, replace=T))

library(reshape)
Molten <- melt(test_data, id.vars = c("group", "year"))
cast(group + variable ~ year, data = Molten, fun = mean)

The result looks like this

   group variable         2007         2009
1      a     var0  0.003767891  0.340989068
2      a     var1  2.009026385  1.162786943
3      a     var2  1.861061882  2.676524736
4      a     var3  2.998011426  3.311250399
5      a     var4  3.979255971  4.165715967
6      b     var0 -0.112883844 -0.179762343
7      b     var1  1.342447279  1.199554144
8      b     var2  2.486088196  1.767431740
9      b     var3  3.261451449  2.934903824
10     b     var4  3.489147597  3.076779626
11     c     var0  0.493591055 -0.113469315
12     c     var1  0.157424796 -0.186590644
13     c     var2  2.366594176  2.458204041
14     c     var3  3.485808031  2.817153628
15     c     var4  3.681576886  3.057915666
16     d     var0  0.360188789  1.205875725
17     d     var1  1.271541181  0.898973536
18     d     var2  1.824468264  1.944708165
19     d     var3  2.323315162  3.550719308
20     d     var4  3.852223640  4.647498956
21     e     var0 -0.556751465  0.273865769
22     e     var1  1.173899189  0.719520372
23     e     var2  1.935402724  2.046313047
24     e     var3  3.318669590  2.871462470
25     e     var4  4.374478734  4.522511874
26     f     var0 -0.258956555 -0.007729091
27     f     var1  1.424479454  1.175242755
28     f     var2  1.797948551  2.411030282
29     f     var3  3.083169793  3.324584667
30     f     var4  4.160641429  3.546527820
31     g     var0  0.189038036 -0.683028110
32     g     var1  0.429915866  0.827761101
33     g     var2  1.839982321  1.513104866
34     g     var3  3.106414330  2.755975622
35     g     var4  4.599340239  3.691478466
36     h     var0  0.015557352 -0.707257185
37     h     var1  0.933199148  1.037655156
38     h     var2  1.927442457  2.521369108
39     h     var3  3.246734239  3.703213646
40     h     var4  4.242387776  4.407960355
41     i     var0  0.885226638 -0.288221276
42     i     var1  1.216012653  1.502514588
43     i     var2  2.302815441  1.905731471
44     i     var3  2.026631277  2.836508446
45     i     var4  4.800676814  4.772964668
46     j     var0 -0.435661855  0.192703997
47     j     var1  0.836814185  0.394505861
48     j     var2  1.663523873  2.377640369
49     j     var3  3.489536343  3.457597835
50     j     var4  4.146020948  4.281599816

Answer 2

You can do this with by(). First set up some data:

R> set.seed(42)
R> testdf <- data.frame(var1=rnorm(100), var2=rnorm(100,2), var3=rnorm(100,3),  
                        group=as.factor(sample(letters[1:10],100,replace=T)),  
                        year=as.factor(sample(c(2007,2009),100,replace=T)))
R> summary(testdf)
      var1              var2              var3          group      year   
 Min.   :-2.9931   Min.   :-0.0247   Min.   :0.30   e      :15   2007:50  
 1st Qu.:-0.6167   1st Qu.: 1.4085   1st Qu.:2.29   c      :14   2009:50  
 Median : 0.0898   Median : 1.9307   Median :2.98   f      :12            
 Mean   : 0.0325   Mean   : 1.9125   Mean   :2.99   h      :12            
 3rd Qu.: 0.6616   3rd Qu.: 2.4618   3rd Qu.:3.65   d      :11            
 Max.   : 2.2866   Max.   : 4.7019   Max.   :5.46   b      :10            
                                                    (Other):26  

Use by():

R> by(testdf[,1:3], testdf$year, mean)
testdf$year: 2007
   var1    var2    var3 
0.04681 1.77638 3.00122 
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
testdf$year: 2009
   var1    var2    var3 
0.01822 2.04865 2.97805 
R> by(testdf[,1:3], list(testdf$group, testdf$year), mean)  
## longer answer by group and year suppressed

You still need to reformat this for your table but it does give you the gist of your answer in one line.

Edit: Further processing can be had via

R> foo <- by(testdf[,1:3], list(testdf$group, testdf$year), mean)  
R> do.call(rbind, foo)
          var1   var2  var3
 [1,]  0.62352 0.2549 3.157
 [2,]  0.08867 1.8313 3.607
 [3,] -0.69093 2.5431 3.094
 [4,]  0.02792 2.8068 3.181
 [5,] -0.26423 1.3269 2.781
 [6,]  0.07119 1.9453 3.284
 [7,] -0.10438 2.1181 3.783
 [8,]  0.21147 1.6345 2.470
 [9,]  1.17986 1.6518 2.362
[10,] -0.42708 1.5683 3.144
[11,] -0.82681 1.9528 2.740
[12,] -0.27191 1.8333 3.090
[13,]  0.15854 2.2830 2.949
[14,]  0.16438 2.2455 3.100
[15,]  0.07489 2.1798 2.451
[16,] -0.03479 1.6800 3.099
[17,]  0.48082 1.8883 2.569
[18,]  0.32381 2.4015 3.332
[19,] -0.47319 1.5016 2.903
[20,]  0.11743 2.2645 3.452
R> do.call(rbind, dimnames(foo))
     [,1]   [,2]   [,3]   [,4]   [,5]   [,6]   [,7]   [,8]   [,9]   [,10] 
[1,] "a"    "b"    "c"    "d"    "e"    "f"    "g"    "h"    "i"    "j"   
[2,] "2007" "2009" "2007" "2009" "2007" "2009" "2007" "2009" "2007" "2009"

You can play with the dimnames some more:

R> expand.grid(dimnames(foo))
   Var1 Var2
1     a 2007
2     b 2007
3     c 2007
4     d 2007
5     e 2007
6     f 2007
7     g 2007
8     h 2007
9     i 2007
10    j 2007
11    a 2009
12    b 2009
13    c 2009
14    d 2009
15    e 2009
16    f 2009
17    g 2009
18    h 2009
19    i 2009
20    j 2009
R> 

Edit: And with that, we can create a data.frame for the result without resorting to external packages using only base R:

R> data.frame(cbind(expand.grid(dimnames(foo)), do.call(rbind, foo)))
   Var1 Var2     var1   var2  var3
1     a 2007  0.62352 0.2549 3.157
2     b 2007  0.08867 1.8313 3.607
3     c 2007 -0.69093 2.5431 3.094
4     d 2007  0.02792 2.8068 3.181
5     e 2007 -0.26423 1.3269 2.781
6     f 2007  0.07119 1.9453 3.284
7     g 2007 -0.10438 2.1181 3.783
8     h 2007  0.21147 1.6345 2.470
9     i 2007  1.17986 1.6518 2.362
10    j 2007 -0.42708 1.5683 3.144
11    a 2009 -0.82681 1.9528 2.740
12    b 2009 -0.27191 1.8333 3.090
13    c 2009  0.15854 2.2830 2.949
14    d 2009  0.16438 2.2455 3.100
15    e 2009  0.07489 2.1798 2.451
16    f 2009 -0.03479 1.6800 3.099
17    g 2009  0.48082 1.8883 2.569
18    h 2009  0.32381 2.4015 3.332
19    i 2009 -0.47319 1.5016 2.903
20    j 2009  0.11743 2.2645 3.452
R> 

Answer 3

EDIT: I wrote the following and then realized that Thierry had already written up almost EXACTLY the same answer. I somehow overlooked his answer. So if you like this answer, vote his up instead. I'm going ahead and posting since I spent the time typing it up.

---

This sort of stuff consumes way more of my time than I wish it did! Here's a solution using the reshape package by Hadley Wickham. This example does not do exactly what you asked because the results are all in one big table, not a table for each group.

The trouble you were having with the numeric values showing up as factors was because you were using cbind and everything was getting slammed into a matrix of type character. The cool thing is you don't need cbind with data.frame.

test_data <- data.frame(
var0 = rnorm(100),
var1 = rnorm(100,1),
var2 = rnorm(100,2),
var3 = rnorm(100,3),
var4 = rnorm(100,4),
group = sample(letters[1:10],100,replace=T),
year = sample(c(2007,2009),100, replace=T))

library(reshape)
molten_data <- melt(test_data, id=c("group", "year")))
cast(molten_data, group + variable ~ year, mean)

and this results in the following:

    group variable        2007         2009
1      a     var0 -0.92040686 -0.154746420
2      a     var1  1.06603832  0.559765035
3      a     var2  2.34476321  2.206521587
4      a     var3  3.01652065  3.256580166
5      a     var4  3.75256699  3.907777127
6      b     var0 -0.53207427 -0.149144766
7      b     var1  0.75677714  0.879387608
8      b     var2  2.41739521  1.224854891
9      b     var3  2.63877431  2.436837719
10     b     var4  3.69640598  4.439047363
...

I wrote a blog post recently about doing something similar with plyr. I should do a part 2 about how to do the same thing using the reshape package. Both plyr and reshape were written by Hadley Wickham and are crazy useful tools.