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Average This is the arithmetic mean, and is calculated by adding a group of numbers and then dividing by the count of those numbers. For example, the average of 2, 3, 3, 5, 7, and 10 is 30 divided by 6, which is 5.
Groupby Function in R – group_by is used to group the dataframe in R. Dplyr package in R is provided with group_by() function which groups the dataframe by multiple columns with mean, sum and other functions like count, maximum and minimum.
This type of operation is exactly what aggregate was designed for:
d <- read.table(text=
'Name Month Rate1 Rate2
Aira 1 12 23
Aira 2 18 73
Aira 3 19 45
Ben 1 53 19
Ben 2 22 87
Ben 3 19 45
Cat 1 22 87
Cat 2 67 43
Cat 3 45 32', header=TRUE)
aggregate(d[, 3:4], list(d$Name), mean)
Group.1 Rate1 Rate2
1 Aira 16.33333 47.00000
2 Ben 31.33333 50.33333
3 Cat 44.66667 54.00000
Here we aggregate columns 3 and 4 of data.frame d, grouping by d$Name, and applying the mean function.
Or, using a formula interface:
aggregate(. ~ Name, d[-2], mean)
Or use group_by & summarise_at from the dplyr package:
library(dplyr)
d %>%
group_by(Name) %>%
summarise_at(vars(-Month), funs(mean(., na.rm=TRUE)))
# A tibble: 3 x 3
Name Rate1 Rate2
<fct> <dbl> <dbl>
1 Aira 16.3 47.0
2 Ben 31.3 50.3
3 Cat 44.7 54.0
See ?summarise_at for the many ways to specify the variables to act on. Here, vars(-Month) says all variables except Month.
In more recent versions of tidyverse/dplyr, using summarise(across(...)) is preferred to summarise_at:
d %>%
group_by(Name) %>%
summarise(across(-Month, mean, na.rm = TRUE))
You can also use package plyr, which is somehow more versatile:
library(plyr)
ddply(d, .(Name), summarize, Rate1=mean(Rate1), Rate2=mean(Rate2))
Name Rate1 Rate2
1 Aira 16.33333 47.00000
2 Ben 31.33333 50.33333
3 Cat 44.66667 54.00000
A third great alternative is using the package data.table, which also has the class data.frame, but operations like you are looking for are computed much faster.
library(data.table)
mydt <- structure(list(Name = c("Aira", "Aira", "Aira", "Ben", "Ben", "Ben", "Cat", "Cat", "Cat"), Month = c(1L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 2L, 3L), Rate1 = c(15.6396600443877, 2.15649279424609, 6.24692918928743, 2.37658797276116, 34.7500663272292, 3.28750138697048, 29.3265553981065, 17.9821839334431, 10.8639802575958), Rate2 = c(17.1680489538369, 5.84231656330206, 8.54330866437461, 5.88415184986176, 3.02064294862551, 17.2053351400752, 16.9552950199166, 2.56058000170089, 15.7496228048122)), .Names = c("Name", "Month", "Rate1", "Rate2"), row.names = c(NA, -9L), class = c("data.table", "data.frame"))
Now to take the mean of Rate1 and Rate2 for all 3 months, for each person (Name): First, decide which columns you want to take the mean of
colstoavg <- names(mydt)[3:4]
Now we use lapply to take the mean over the columns we want to avg (colstoavg)
mydt.mean <- mydt[,lapply(.SD,mean,na.rm=TRUE),by=Name,.SDcols=colstoavg]
mydt.mean
Name Rate1 Rate2
1: Aira 8.014361 10.517891
2: Ben 13.471385 8.703377
3: Cat 19.390907 11.755166
Here are a variety of ways to do this in base R including an alternative aggregate approach. The examples below return means per month, which I think is what you requested. Although, the same approach could be used to return means per person:
Using ave:
my.data <- read.table(text = '
Name Month Rate1 Rate2
Aira 1 12 23
Aira 2 18 73
Aira 3 19 45
Ben 1 53 19
Ben 2 22 87
Ben 3 19 45
Cat 1 22 87
Cat 2 67 43
Cat 3 45 32
', header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE, na.strings = 'NA')
Rate1.mean <- with(my.data, ave(Rate1, Month, FUN = function(x) mean(x, na.rm = TRUE)))
Rate2.mean <- with(my.data, ave(Rate2, Month, FUN = function(x) mean(x, na.rm = TRUE)))
my.data <- data.frame(my.data, Rate1.mean, Rate2.mean)
my.data
Using by:
my.data <- read.table(text = '
Name Month Rate1 Rate2
Aira 1 12 23
Aira 2 18 73
Aira 3 19 45
Ben 1 53 19
Ben 2 22 87
Ben 3 19 45
Cat 1 22 87
Cat 2 67 43
Cat 3 45 32
', header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE, na.strings = 'NA')
by.month <- as.data.frame(do.call("rbind", by(my.data, my.data$Month, FUN = function(x) colMeans(x[,3:4]))))
colnames(by.month) <- c('Rate1.mean', 'Rate2.mean')
by.month <- cbind(Month = rownames(by.month), by.month)
my.data <- merge(my.data, by.month, by = 'Month')
my.data
Using lapply and split:
my.data <- read.table(text = '
Name Month Rate1 Rate2
Aira 1 12 23
Aira 2 18 73
Aira 3 19 45
Ben 1 53 19
Ben 2 22 87
Ben 3 19 45
Cat 1 22 87
Cat 2 67 43
Cat 3 45 32
', header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE, na.strings = 'NA')
ly.mean <- lapply(split(my.data, my.data$Month), function(x) c(Mean = colMeans(x[,3:4])))
ly.mean <- as.data.frame(do.call("rbind", ly.mean))
ly.mean <- cbind(Month = rownames(ly.mean), ly.mean)
my.data <- merge(my.data, ly.mean, by = 'Month')
my.data
Using sapply and split:
my.data <- read.table(text = '
Name Month Rate1 Rate2
Aira 1 12 23
Aira 2 18 73
Aira 3 19 45
Ben 1 53 19
Ben 2 22 87
Ben 3 19 45
Cat 1 22 87
Cat 2 67 43
Cat 3 45 32
', header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE, na.strings = 'NA')
my.data
sy.mean <- t(sapply(split(my.data, my.data$Month), function(x) colMeans(x[,3:4])))
colnames(sy.mean) <- c('Rate1.mean', 'Rate2.mean')
sy.mean <- data.frame(Month = rownames(sy.mean), sy.mean, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
my.data <- merge(my.data, sy.mean, by = 'Month')
my.data
Using aggregate:
my.data <- read.table(text = '
Name Month Rate1 Rate2
Aira 1 12 23
Aira 2 18 73
Aira 3 19 45
Ben 1 53 19
Ben 2 22 87
Ben 3 19 45
Cat 1 22 87
Cat 2 67 43
Cat 3 45 32
', header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE, na.strings = 'NA')
my.summary <- with(my.data, aggregate(list(Rate1, Rate2), by = list(Month),
FUN = function(x) { mon.mean = mean(x, na.rm = TRUE) } ))
my.summary <- do.call(data.frame, my.summary)
colnames(my.summary) <- c('Month', 'Rate1.mean', 'Rate2.mean')
my.summary
my.data <- merge(my.data, my.summary, by = 'Month')
my.data
EDIT: June 28, 2020
Here I use aggregate to obtain the column means of an entire matrix by group where group is defined in an external vector:
my.group <- c(1,2,1,2,2,3,1,2,3,3)
my.data <- matrix(c( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
10, 20, 30, 40, 50,
2, 4, 6, 8, 10,
20, 30, 40, 50, 60,
20, 18, 16, 14, 12,
1000, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400,
2, 3, 4, 3, 2,
50, 40, 30, 20, 10,
1001, 2001, 3001, 4001, 5001,
1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000), nrow = 10, ncol = 5, byrow = TRUE)
my.data
my.summary <- aggregate(list(my.data), by = list(my.group), FUN = function(x) { my.mean = mean(x, na.rm = TRUE) } )
my.summary
# Group.1 X1 X2 X3 X4 X5
#1 1 1.666667 3.000 4.333333 5.000 5.666667
#2 2 25.000000 27.000 29.000000 31.000 33.000000
#3 3 1000.333333 1700.333 2400.333333 3100.333 3800.333333
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