Extract row corresponding to minimum value of a variable by group

Question

I wish to (1) group data by one variable (State), (2) within each group find the row of minimum value of another variable (Employees), and (3) extr

Answer 1

The base function by is often useful for working with block data in data.frames. For example

by(data, data$State, function(x) x[which.min(x$Employees), ] )

It does return the data in a list, but you can collapse that with

do.call(rbind, by(data, data$State, function(x) x[which.min(x$Employees), ] ))