identify groups of linked episodes which chain together

Question

Take this simple data frame of linked ids:

test <- data.frame(id1=c(10,10,1,1,24,8),id2=c(1,36,24,45,300,11))

> test
  id1 id2
1  10   1
2  10  36
3   1  24
4   1  45
5  24 300
6   8  11

I now want to group together all the ids which link. By 'link', I mean follow through the chain of links so that all ids in one group are labelled together. A kind of branching structure. i.e:

Group 1
10 --> 1,   1 --> (24,45)
                   24 --> 300
                          300 --> NULL
                   45 --> NULL
10 --> 36, 36 --> NULL,
Final group members: 10,1,24,36,45,300

Group 2
8 --> 11
      11 --> NULL
Final group members: 8,11

Now I roughly know the logic I would want, but don't know how I would implement it elegantly. I am thinking of a recursive use of match or %in% to go down each branch, but am truly stumped this time.

The final result I would be chasing is:

result <- data.frame(group=c(1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2),id=c(10,1,24,36,45,300,8,11))

> result
  group  id
1     1  10
2     1   1
3     1  24
4     1  36
5     1  45
6     1 300
7     2   8
8     2  11

Answer 1

The Bioconductor package RBGL (an R interface to the BOOST graph library) contains a function, connectedComp(), which identifies the connected components in a graph -- just what you are wanting.

(To use the function, you will first need to install the graph and RBGL packages, available here and here.)

library(RBGL)
test <- data.frame(id1=c(10,10,1,1,24,8),id2=c(1,36,24,45,300,11))

## Convert your 'from-to' data to a 'node and edge-list' representation  
## used by the 'graph' & 'RBGL' packages 
g <- ftM2graphNEL(as.matrix(test))

## Extract the connected components
cc <- connectedComp(g)

## Massage results into the format you're after 
ld <- lapply(seq_along(cc), 
             function(i) data.frame(group = names(cc)[i], id = cc[[i]]))
do.call(rbind, ld)
#   group  id
# 1     1  10
# 2     1   1
# 3     1  24
# 4     1  36
# 5     1  45
# 6     1 300
# 7     2   8
# 8     2  11

Answer 2

Here's an alternative answer that I have discovered myself after the nudging in the right direction by Josh. This answer uses the igraph package. For those that are searching and come across this answer, my test dataset is referred to as an "edge list" or "adjacency list" in graph theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory)

library(igraph)
test <- data.frame(id1=c(10,10,1,1,24,8 ),id2=c(1,36,24,45,300,11))
gr.test <- graph_from_data_frame(test)
links <- data.frame(id=unique(unlist(test)),group=components(gr.test)$membership)
links[order(links$group),]

#   id group
#1  10     1
#2   1     1
#3  24     1
#5  36     1
#6  45     1
#7 300     1
#4   8     2
#8  11     2