Grouping Over All Possible Combinations of Several Variables With dplyr

Question

Given a situation such as the following

library(dplyr)
myData <- tbl_df(data.frame( var1 = rnorm(100), 
                             var2 = letters[1:3] %         


        

Answer 1

I have created a function based on the answer of @Gregor and the comments that followed:

library(magrittr)
myData <- tbl_df(data.frame( var1 = rnorm(100), 
                         var2 = letters[1:3] %>%
                                sample(100, replace = TRUE) %>%
                                factor(), 
                         var3 = LETTERS[1:3] %>%
                                sample(100, replace = TRUE) %>%
                                factor(), 
                         var4 = month.abb[1:3] %>%
                                sample(100, replace = TRUE) %>%
                                factor()))

Function combSummarise

combSummarise <- function(data, variables=..., summarise=...){


  # Get all different combinations of selected variables (credit to @Michael)
    myGroups <- lapply(seq_along(variables), function(x) {
    combn(c(variables), x, simplify = FALSE)}) %>%
    unlist(recursive = FALSE)

  # Group by selected variables (credit to @konvas)
    df <- eval(parse(text=paste("lapply(myGroups, function(x){
               dplyr::group_by_(data, .dots=x) %>% 
               dplyr::summarize_( \"", paste(summarise, collapse="\",\""),"\")})"))) %>% 
          do.call(plyr::rbind.fill,.)

    groupNames <- c(myGroups[[length(myGroups)]])
    newNames <- names(df)[!(names(df) %in% groupNames)]

    df <- cbind(df[, groupNames], df[, newNames])
    names(df) <- c(groupNames, newNames)
    df

}

Call of combSummarise

combSummarise (myData, var=c("var2", "var3", "var4"), 
               summarise=c("length(var1)", "mean(var1)", "max(var1)"))

or

combSummarise (myData, var=c("var2", "var4"), 
               summarise=c("length(var1)", "mean(var1)", "max(var1)"))

or

combSummarise (myData, var=c("var2", "var4"), 
           summarise=c("length(var1)"))

etc