Remove duplicates keeping entry with largest absolute value

Question

Let\'s say I have four samples: id=1, 2, 3, and 4, with one or more measurements on each of those samples:

> a <- data.frame(id=c(1,1,2,2,3,4), value=c         


        

Answer 1

Another approach (though the code might look a little cumbersome) is to use ave():

a[which(abs(a$value) == ave(a$value, a$id, 
                            FUN=function(x) max(abs(x)))), ]
#   id value
# 2  1     2
# 4  2    -4
# 5  3    -5
# 6  4     6