Count unique values for every column

Question

I would like to return the count of the unique values for every column in a table. For example, if I have the table:

 Testdata <- data.frame(var_1 = c(\"a         


        

Answer 1

I just tried all solution and two of the above solutions did not work one with aggregate and the tidyr ones but two of them using did not work. I think using a data table is a good choice ,

setDT(Testdata)[, lapply(.SD, uniqueN), .SDcols=c("var_1","var_2","var_3")]
   #    var_1 var_2 var_3
   # 1:     1     1     3

I tried to compare them from each other

library(microbenchmark)
Mycomp = microbenchmark(
  apply = apply(Testdata, 2, function(x)length(unique(x))),
  lapply = lapply(Testdata, function(x)length(unique(x))),
  sapply = sapply(Testdata, function(x)length(unique(x))),
  #base = aggregate(values ~ ind, unique(stack(Testdata)), length),
  datatable = setDT(Testdata)[, lapply(.SD, uniqueN), .SDcols=c("var_1","var_2","var_3")],
  times=50
)

#Unit: microseconds
#      expr     min      lq     mean   median      uq     max neval cld
#     apply 163.315 176.678 192.0435 181.7915 192.047 608.859    50  b 
#    lapply 138.217 147.339 157.9684 153.0640 165.829 254.145    50 a  
#    sapply 160.338 169.124 178.1486 174.3965 185.548 203.419    50  b 
# datatable 667.937 684.650 698.1306 696.0160 703.390 874.073    50   c