Numbering rows within groups in a data frame

Question

Use ave, ddply, dplyr or data.table:

df$num <- ave(df$val, df$cat, FUN = seq_along)

or:

library(plyr)
ddply(df, .(cat), mutate, id = seq_along(val))

or:

library(dplyr)
df %>% group_by(cat) %>% mutate(id = row_number())

or (the most memory efficient, as it assigns by reference within DT):

library(data.table)
DT <- data.table(df)

DT[, id := seq_len(.N), by = cat]
DT[, id := rowid(cat)]

For making this r-faq question more complete, a base R alternative with sequence and rle:

df$num <- sequence(rle(df$cat)$lengths)

which gives the intended result:

> df
   cat        val num
4  aaa 0.05638315   1
2  aaa 0.25767250   2
1  aaa 0.30776611   3
5  aaa 0.46854928   4
3  aaa 0.55232243   5
10 bbb 0.17026205   1
8  bbb 0.37032054   2
6  bbb 0.48377074   3
9  bbb 0.54655860   4
7  bbb 0.81240262   5
13 ccc 0.28035384   1
14 ccc 0.39848790   2
11 ccc 0.62499648   3
15 ccc 0.76255108   4
12 ccc 0.88216552   5

If df$cat is a factor variable, you need to wrap it in as.character first:

df$num <- sequence(rle(as.character(df$cat))$lengths)

Here is a small improvement trick that allows sort 'val' inside the groups:

# 1. Data set
set.seed(100)
df <- data.frame(
  cat = c(rep("aaa", 5), rep("ccc", 5), rep("bbb", 5)), 
  val = runif(15))             

# 2. 'dplyr' approach
df %>% 
  arrange(cat, val) %>% 
  group_by(cat) %>% 
  mutate(id = row_number())

Another dplyr possibility could be:

df %>%
 group_by(cat) %>%
 mutate(num = 1:n())

   cat      val   num
   <fct>  <dbl> <int>
 1 aaa   0.0564     1
 2 aaa   0.258      2
 3 aaa   0.308      3
 4 aaa   0.469      4
 5 aaa   0.552      5
 6 bbb   0.170      1
 7 bbb   0.370      2
 8 bbb   0.484      3
 9 bbb   0.547      4
10 bbb   0.812      5
11 ccc   0.280      1
12 ccc   0.398      2
13 ccc   0.625      3
14 ccc   0.763      4
15 ccc   0.882      5

I would like to add a data.table variant using the rank() function which provides the additional possibility to change the ordering and thus makes it a bit more flexible than the seq_len() solution and is pretty similar to row_number functions in RDBMS.

# Variant with ascending ordering
library(data.table)
dt <- data.table(df)
dt[, .( val
   , num = rank(val))
    , by = list(cat)][order(cat, num),]

    cat        val num
 1: aaa 0.05638315   1
 2: aaa 0.25767250   2
 3: aaa 0.30776611   3
 4: aaa 0.46854928   4
 5: aaa 0.55232243   5
 6: bbb 0.17026205   1
 7: bbb 0.37032054   2
 8: bbb 0.48377074   3
 9: bbb 0.54655860   4
10: bbb 0.81240262   5
11: ccc 0.28035384   1
12: ccc 0.39848790   2
13: ccc 0.62499648   3
14: ccc 0.76255108   4

# Variant with descending ordering
dt[, .( val
   , num = rank(desc(val)))
    , by = list(cat)][order(cat, num),]

Edit on 2021-04-16 to make the switch between descending and ascending order more fail-safe

Here is an option using a for loop by groups rather by rows (like OP did)

for (i in unique(df$cat)) df$num[df$cat == i] <- seq_len(sum(df$cat == i))