I want to group a data frame by a column (owner) and output a new data frame that has counts of each type of a factor at each observation. The real data frame is fairly larg
If you wanted to forego the dplyr, you can split into lists.
df <- split(df, list(df[[obs1]], df[[obs2]])
If you wanted the count, you just create an sapply or lapply call to run through the lists and get the count of each one. Or literally any other function you want.