Aggregate by multiple columns and reshape from long to wide

Question

There are some questions similar to this topic on SO but not exactly like my usecase. I have a dataset where the columns are laid out as shown below

     Id          


        

Answer 1

Use dcast or even acast from reshape2() package

dcast(dat,Id~Description,mean)
   Id   Cat   Dog
 1 10 14.25 14.25
 2 11 15.25 15.25

Base R might be abit longer:

 reshape(aggregate(.~Id+Description,dat,mean),direction = "wide",v.names  = "Value",idvar = "Id",timevar = "Description")
  Id Value.Cat Value.Dog
1 10     14.25     14.25
2 11     15.25     15.25