In R, how to sum certain rows of a data frame with certain logic?

Question

Hi experienced R users,

It\'s kind of a simple thing. I want to sum x by Group.1 depending on one controllable variable.

I\'d like

Answer 1

You could use the by function.

For instance, given the following data.frame:

d <- data.frame(Group.1=c(1,1,2,1,3,3,1,3),Group.2=c('Eggs'),x=1:8)

> d
  Group.1 Group.2 x
1       1    Eggs 1
2       1    Eggs 2
3       2    Eggs 3
4       1    Eggs 4
5       3    Eggs 5
6       3    Eggs 6
7       1    Eggs 7
8       3    Eggs 8

You can do this:

num <- 3 # sum only the first 3 rows

# The aggregation function:
# it is called for each group receiving the 
# data.frame subset as input and returns the aggregated row
innerFunc <- function(subDf){
  # we create the aggregated row by taking the first row of the subset
  row <- head(subDf,1)
  # we set the x column in the result row to the sum of the first "num"
  # elements of the subset
  row$x <- sum(head(subDf$x,num))
  return(row)
}
# Here we call the "by" function:
# it returns an object of class "by" that is a list of the resulting
# aggregated rows; we want to convert it to a data.frame, so we call
# rbind repeatedly by using "do.call(rbind, ... )"
d2 <- do.call(rbind,by(data=d,INDICES=d$Group.1,FUN=innerFunc))

> d2
  Group.1 Group.2  x
1       1    Eggs  7
2       2    Eggs  3
3       3    Eggs 19