dplyr mutate with conditional values

Question

In a large dataframe (\"myfile\") with four columns I have to add a fifth column with values conditionally based on the first four columns.

Prefer answers with

Answer 1

With dplyr 0.7.2, you can use the very useful case_when function :

x=read.table(
 text="V1 V2 V3 V4
 1  1  2  3  5
 2  2  4  4  1
 3  1  4  1  1
 4  4  5  1  3
 5  5  5  5  4")
x$V5 = case_when(x$V1==1 & x$V2!=4 ~ 1,
                 x$V2==4 & x$V3!=1 ~ 2,
                 TRUE ~ 0)

Expressed with dplyr::mutate, it gives:

x = x %>% mutate(
     V5 = case_when(
         V1==1 & V2!=4 ~ 1,
         V2==4 & V3!=1 ~ 2,
         TRUE ~ 0
     )
)

Please note that NA are not treated specially, as it can be misleading. The function will return NA only when no condition is matched. If you put a line with TRUE ~ ..., like I did in my example, the return value will then never be NA.

Therefore, you have to expressively tell case_when to put NA where it belongs by adding a statement like is.na(x$V1) | is.na(x$V3) ~ NA_integer_. Hint: the dplyr::coalesce() function can be really useful here sometimes!

Moreover, please note that NA alone will usually not work, you have to put special NA values : NA_integer_, NA_character_ or NA_real_.