How to summarize data by group in R?

Question

I have R data frame like this:

        age group
1   23.0883     1
2   25.8344     1
3   29.4648     1
4   32.7858     2
5   33.6372     1
6   34.9350     1
7   35.2115     2
8   35.2115     2
9   35.2115     2
10  36.7803     1
...

I need to get data frame in the following form:

group mean     sd
1     34.5     5.6
2     32.3     4.2
...

Group number may vary, but their names and quantity could be obtained by calling levels(factor(data$group))

What manipulations should be done with the data to get the result?

Answer 1

Here is the plyr one line variant using ddply:

dt <- data.frame(age=rchisq(20,10),group=sample(1:2,20,rep=T))
ddply(dt,~group,summarise,mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age))

Here is another one line variant using new package data.table.

dtf <- data.frame(age=rchisq(100000,10),group=factor(sample(1:10,100000,rep=T)))
dt <- data.table(dtf)
dt[,list(mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age)),by=group]

This one is faster, though this is noticeable only on table with 100k rows. Timings on my Macbook Pro with 2.53 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor and R 2.11.1:

> system.time(aa <- ddply(dtf,~group,summarise,mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age)))
utilisateur     système      écoulé 
      0.513       0.180       0.692 
> system.time(aa <- dt[,list(mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age)),by=group])
utilisateur     système      écoulé 
      0.087       0.018       0.103 

Further savings are possible if we use setkey:

> setkey(dt,group)
> system.time(dt[,list(mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age)),by=group])
utilisateur     système      écoulé 
      0.040       0.007       0.048 

Answer 2

One possibility is to use the aggregate function. For instance,

aggregate(data$age, by=list(data$group), FUN=mean)[2]

gives you the second column of the desired result.

Answer 3

Since you are manipulating a data frame, the dplyr package is probably the faster way to do it.

library(dplyr)
dt <- data.frame(age=rchisq(20,10), group=sample(1:2,20, rep=T))
grp <- group_by(dt, group)
summarise(grp, mean=mean(age), sd=sd(age))

or equivalently, using the dplyr/magrittr pipe operator:

library(dplyr)
dt <- data.frame(age=rchisq(20,10), group=sample(1:2,20, rep=T))
group_by(dt, group) %>%
 summarise(mean=mean(age), sd=sd(age))

EDIT full use of pipe operator:

library(dplyr)
data.frame(age=rchisq(20,10), group=sample(1:2,20, rep=T)) %>%
  group_by(group) %>%
  summarise(mean=mean(age), sd=sd(age))

Answer 4

Great, thanks bquast for adding the dplyr solution!

Turns out that then, dplyr and data.table are very close:

library(plyr)
library(dplyr)
library(data.table)
library(rbenchmark)

dtf <- data.frame(age=rchisq(100000,10),group=factor(sample(1:10,100000,rep=T)))
dt <- data.table(dtf)

setkey(dt,group)

a<-benchmark(ddply(dtf,~group,plyr:::summarise,mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age)),
         dt[,list(mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age)),by=group],
         group_by(dt, group) %>% summarise(mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age) ),
         group_by(dtf, group) %>% summarise(mean=mean(age),sd=sd(age) )
)

a[, c(1,3,4)]

data.table is still the fastest, by followed very closely by dplyr(), which interestingly seems faster on the data.frame than the data.table:

                                                              test elapsed relative
1 ddply(dtf, ~group, plyr:::summarise, mean = mean(age), sd = sd(age))   1.689    4.867
2               dt[, list(mean = mean(age), sd = sd(age)), by = group]   0.347    1.000
4   group_by(dtf, group) %>% summarise(mean = mean(age), sd = sd(age))   0.369    1.063
3    group_by(dt, group) %>% summarise(mean = mean(age), sd = sd(age))   0.580    1.671

Answer 5

In addition to existing suggestions, you might want to check out the describe.by function in the psych package.

It provides a number of descriptive statistics including the mean and standard deviation based on a grouping variable.

Answer 6

I have found the function summaryBy in the doBy package to be the most convenient for this:

library(doBy)

age    = c(23.0883, 25.8344, 29.4648, 32.7858, 33.6372,
           34.935,  35.2115, 35.2115,  5.2115, 36.7803)
group  = c(1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1)
dframe = data.frame(age=age, group=group)

summaryBy(age~group, data=dframe, FUN=c(mean, sd))
# 
#   group age.mean    age.sd
# 1     1 30.62333  5.415439
# 2     2 27.10507 14.640441

Answer 7

Use the sqldf package. This allows you now to use SQL to summarize the data. Once you load it you can write something like -

sqldf('  select group,avg(age) from data group by group  ')

Answer 8

Edited: According to chl's suggestions

The function you are looking for is called "tapply" which applies a function per group specified by a factor.

# create some artificial data
set.seed(42)
groups <- 5

agedat <- c()
groupdat <- c()

for(group in 1:groups){
    agedat <- c(agedat,rnorm(100,mean=0 + group,1/group))
    groupdat <- c(groupdat,rep(group,100))
}
dat <- data.frame("age"=agedat,"group"=factor(groupdat))

# calculate mean and stdev age per group
res <- rbind.data.frame(group=1:5, with(dat, tapply(age, group, function(x) c(mean(x), sd(x)))))
names(res) <- paste("group",1:5)
row.names(res)[2:3] <- c("mean","sd")

I really suggest to work through a basic R tutorial explaining all commonly used datastructures and methods. Otherwise you will get stuck every inch during programming. See this question for a collection of free available resources.

Answer 9

Here is an example with the function aggregates() I did myself some time ago:

# simulates data
set.seed(666)
( dat <- data.frame(group=gl(3,6), level=factor(rep(c("A","B","C"), 6)), 
                    y=round(rnorm(18,10),1)) )

> dat
   group level    y
1      1     A 10.8
2      1     B 12.0
3      1     C  9.6
4      1     A 12.0
5      1     B  7.8
6      1     C 10.8
7      2     A  8.7
8      2     B  9.2
9      2     C  8.2
10     2     A 10.0
11     2     B 12.2
12     2     C  8.2
13     3     A 10.9
14     3     B  8.3
15     3     C 10.1
16     3     A  9.9
17     3     B 10.9
18     3     C 10.3

# aggregates() function
aggregates <- function(formula, data=NULL, FUNS){ 
    if(class(FUNS)=="list"){ 
        f <- function(x) sapply(FUNS, function(fun) fun(x)) 
    }else{f <- FUNS} 
    temp <- aggregate(formula, data, f) 
    out <- data.frame(temp[,-ncol(temp)], temp[,ncol(temp)]) 
    colnames(out)[1] <- colnames(temp)[1] 
return(out) 
} 

# example 
FUNS <- function(x) c(mean=round(mean(x),0), sd=round(sd(x), 0)) 
( ag <- aggregates(y~group:level, data=dat, FUNS=FUNS) ) 

It gives the following result:

> ag
  group level mean sd
1     1     A   11  1
2     2     A    9  1
3     3     A   10  1
4     1     B   10  3
5     2     B   11  2
6     3     B   10  2
7     1     C   10  1
8     2     C    8  0
9     3     C   10  0

Maybe you can get the same result starting from the R function split():

> with(dat, sapply( split(y, group:level), FUNS ) )
     1:A 1:B 1:C 2:A 2:B 2:C 3:A 3:B 3:C
mean  11  10  10   9  11   8  10  10  10
sd     1   3   1   1   2   0   1   2   0

Let me come back to the output of the aggregates function. You can transform it in a beautiful table using reshape(), xtabs() and ftable():

rag <- reshape(ag, varying=list(3:4), direction="long", v.names="y") 
rag$time <- factor(rag$time) 
ft <- ftable(xtabs(y~group+level+time, data=rag)) 
attributes(ft)$col.vars <- list(c("mean","sd")) 

This gives:

> ft 
             mean sd
group level         
1     A        11  1
      B        10  3
      C        10  1
2     A         9  1
      B        11  2
      C         8  0
3     A        10  1
      B        10  2
      C        10  0

Beautiful, isn't it? You can export this table to a pdf with the textplot() function of the gplots package.

See here for others' solutions.