Can dplyr package be used for conditional mutating?

Question

Can the mutate be used when the mutation is conditional (depending on the values of certain column values)?

This example helps showing what I mean.

s         


        

Answer 1

dplyr now has a function case_when that offers a vectorised if. The syntax is a little strange compared to mosaic:::derivedFactor as you cannot access variables in the standard dplyr way, and need to declare the mode of NA, but it is considerably faster than mosaic:::derivedFactor.

df %>%
mutate(g = case_when(a %in% c(2,5,7) | (a==1 & b==4) ~ 2L, 
                     a %in% c(0,1,3,4) | c == 4 ~ 3L, 
                     TRUE~as.integer(NA)))

EDIT: If you're using dplyr::case_when() from before version 0.7.0 of the package, then you need to precede variable names with '.$' (e.g. write .$a == 1 inside case_when).

Benchmark: For the benchmark (reusing functions from Arun 's post) and reducing sample size:

require(data.table) 
require(mosaic) 
require(dplyr)
require(microbenchmark)

set.seed(42) # To recreate the dataframe
DT <- setDT(lapply(1:6, function(x) sample(7, 10000, TRUE)))
setnames(DT, letters[1:6])
DF <- as.data.frame(DT)

DPLYR_case_when <- function(DF) {
  DF %>%
  mutate(g = case_when(a %in% c(2,5,7) | (a==1 & b==4) ~ 2L, 
                       a %in% c(0,1,3,4) | c==4 ~ 3L, 
                       TRUE~as.integer(NA)))
}

DT_fun <- function(DT) {
  DT[(a %in% c(0,1,3,4) | c == 4), g := 3L]
  DT[a %in% c(2,5,7) | (a==1 & b==4), g := 2L]
}

DPLYR_fun <- function(DF) {
  mutate(DF, g = ifelse(a %in% c(2,5,7) | (a==1 & b==4), 2L, 
                    ifelse(a %in% c(0,1,3,4) | c==4, 3L, NA_integer_)))
}

mosa_fun <- function(DF) {
  mutate(DF, g = derivedFactor(
    "2" = (a == 2 | a == 5 | a == 7 | (a == 1 & b == 4)),
    "3" = (a == 0 | a == 1 | a == 4 | a == 3 |  c == 4),
    .method = "first",
    .default = NA
  ))
}

perf_results <- microbenchmark(
  dt_fun <- DT_fun(copy(DT)),
  dplyr_ifelse <- DPLYR_fun(copy(DF)),
  dplyr_case_when <- DPLYR_case_when(copy(DF)),
  mosa <- mosa_fun(copy(DF)),
  times = 100L
)

This gives:

print(perf_results)
Unit: milliseconds
           expr        min         lq       mean     median         uq        max neval
         dt_fun   1.391402    1.560751   1.658337   1.651201   1.716851   2.383801   100
   dplyr_ifelse   1.172601    1.230351   1.331538   1.294851   1.390351   1.995701   100
dplyr_case_when   1.648201    1.768002   1.860968   1.844101   1.958801   2.207001   100
           mosa 255.591301  281.158350 291.391586 286.549802 292.101601 545.880702   100