How to calculate a table of pairwise counts from long-form data frame

Question

I have a \'long-form\' data frame with columns id (the primary key) and featureCode (categorical variable). Each record has between 1 and 9 values

Answer 1

Here is a data.table approach similar to @mrdwab

It will work best if featureCode is a character

library(data.table)

DT <- data.table(dat)
# convert to character
DT[, featureCode := as.character(featureCode)]
# subset those with >1 per id
DT2 <- DT[, N := .N, by = id][N>1]
# create all combinations of 2
# return as a data.table with these as columns `V1` and `V2`
# then count the numbers in each group
DT2[, rbindlist(combn(featureCode,2, 
      FUN = function(x) as.data.table(as.list(x)), simplify = F)), 
    by = id][, .N, by = list(V1,V2)]


     V1   V2 N
1: PPLC PCLI 3
2:  PPL PPLC 1
3:  PPL PCLI 1