loess regression on each group with dplyr::group_by()

Question

Alright, I'm waving my white flag.

I'm trying to compute a loess regression on my dataset.

I want loess to compute a different set of points that plots as a smooth line for each group.

The problem is that the loess calculation is escaping the dplyr::group_by function, so the loess regression is calculated on the whole dataset.

Internet searching leads me to believe this is because dplyr::group_by wasn't meant to work this way.

I just can't figure out how to make this work on a per-group basis.

Here are some examples of my failed attempts.

test2 <- test %>% 
  group_by(CpG) %>% 
  dplyr::arrange(AVGMOrder) %>% 
  do(broom::tidy(predict(loess(Meth ~ AVGMOrder, span = .85, data=.))))

> test2
# A tibble: 136 x 2
# Groups:   CpG [4]
   CpG            x
   <chr>      <dbl>
 1 cg01003813 0.781
 2 cg01003813 0.793
 3 cg01003813 0.805
 4 cg01003813 0.816
 5 cg01003813 0.829
 6 cg01003813 0.841
 7 cg01003813 0.854
 8 cg01003813 0.866
 9 cg01003813 0.878
10 cg01003813 0.893

This one works, but I can't figure out how to apply the result to a column in my original dataframe. The result I want is column x. If I apply x as a column in a separate line, I run into issues because I called dplyr::arrange earlier.

test2 <- test %>% 
  group_by(CpG) %>% 
  dplyr::arrange(AVGMOrder) %>% 
  dplyr::do({
    predict(loess(Meth ~ AVGMOrder, span = .85, data=.))
  })

This one simply fails with the following error.

"Error: Results 1, 2, 3, 4 must be data frames, not numeric"

Also it still isn't applied as a new column with dplyr::mutate

fems <- fems %>% 
  group_by(CpG) %>% 
  dplyr::arrange(AVGMOrder) %>% 
  dplyr::mutate(Loess = predict(loess(Meth ~ AVGMOrder, span = .5, data=.)))

This was my fist attempt and mostly resembles what I want to do. Problem is that this one performs the loess prediction on the entire dataframe and not on each CpG group.

I am really stuck here. I read online that the purr package might help, but I'm having trouble figuring it out.

data looks like this:

> head(test)
    X geneID        CpG                                        CellLine       Meth AVGMOrder neworder Group SmoothMeth
1  40     XG cg25296477 iPS__HDF51IPS14_passage27_Female____165.592.1.2 0.81107210         1        1     5  0.7808767
2  94     XG cg01003813 iPS__HDF51IPS14_passage27_Female____165.592.1.2 0.97052120         1        1     5  0.7927130
3 148     XG cg13176022 iPS__HDF51IPS14_passage27_Female____165.592.1.2 0.06900448         1        1     5  0.8045080
4 202     XG cg26484667 iPS__HDF51IPS14_passage27_Female____165.592.1.2 0.84077890         1        1     5  0.8163997
5  27     XG cg25296477  iPS__HDF51IPS6_passage33_Female____157.647.1.2 0.81623880         2        2     3  0.8285259
6  81     XG cg01003813  iPS__HDF51IPS6_passage33_Female____157.647.1.2 0.95569240         2        2     3  0.8409501

unique(test$CpG) [1] "cg25296477" "cg01003813" "cg13176022" "cg26484667"

So, to be clear, I want to do a loess regression on each unique CpG in my dataframe, apply the resulting "regressed y axis values" to a column matching the original y axis values (Meth).

My actual dataset has a few thousand of those CpG's, not just the four.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-Wluc9NDFSnOeTwgBw4n0pdPuSlMSTfUVM0GJTiEn_Y/edit?usp=sharing

Answer 1

This is a neat Tidyverse way to make it work:

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
library(purrr)
library(ggplot2)

models <- fems %>%
        tidyr::nest(-CpG) %>%
        dplyr::mutate(
                # Perform loess calculation on each CpG group
                m = purrr::map(data, loess,
                               formula = Meth ~ AVGMOrder, span = .5),
                # Retrieve the fitted values from each model
                fitted = purrr::map(m, `[[`, "fitted")
        )

# Apply fitted y's as a new column
results <- models %>%
        dplyr::select(-m) %>%
        tidyr::unnest()

# Plot with loess line for each group
ggplot(results, aes(x = AVGMOrder, y = Meth, group = CpG, colour = CpG)) +
        geom_point() +
        geom_line(aes(y = fitted))

Answer 2

You may have already figured this out -- but if not, here's some help.

Basically, you need to feed the predict function a data.frame (a vector may work too but I didn't try it) of the values you want to predict at.

So for your case:

fems <- fems %>% 
  group_by(CpG) %>% 
  arrange(CpG, AVGMOrder) %>% 
  mutate(Loess = predict(loess(Meth ~ AVGMOrder, span = .5, data=.),
    data.frame(AVGMOrder = seq(min(AVGMOrder), max(AVGMOrder), 1))))

Note, loess requires a minimum number of observations to run (~4? I can't remember precisely). Also, this will take a while to run so test with a slice of your data to make sure it's working properly.