dplyr: apply function table() to each column of a data.frame

Question

Apply function table() to each column of a data.frame using dplyr

I often apply the table-function on each column of a data frame using plyr, like this:

Answer 1

In general you probably would not want to run table() on every column of a data frame because at least one of the variables will be unique (an id field) and produce a very long output. However, you can use group_by() and tally() to obtain frequency tables in a dplyr chain. Or you can use count() which does the group_by() for you.

> mtcars %>% 
    group_by(cyl) %>% 
    tally()
> # mtcars %>% count(cyl)

Source: local data frame [3 x 2]

  cyl  n
1   4 11
2   6  7
3   8 14

If you want to do a two-way frequency table, group by more than one variable.

> mtcars %>% 
    group_by(gear, cyl) %>% 
    tally()
> # mtcars %>% count(gear, cyl)

You can use spread() of the tidyr package to turn that two-way output into the output one is used to receiving with table() when two variables are input.