Count number of rows within each group

Question

I have a dataframe and I would like to count the number of rows within each group. I reguarly use the aggregate function to sum data as follows:

Answer 1

Following @Joshua's suggestion, here's one way you might count the number of observations in your df dataframe where Year = 2007 and Month = Nov (assuming they are columns):

nrow(df[,df$YEAR == 2007 & df$Month == "Nov"])

and with aggregate, following @GregSnow:

aggregate(x ~ Year + Month, data = df, FUN = length)

Answer 2

You can use by functions as by(df1$Year, df1$Month, count) that will produce a list of needed aggregation.

The output will look like,

df1$Month: Feb
     x freq
1 2012    1
2 2013    1
3 2014    5
--------------------------------------------------------------- 
df1$Month: Jan
     x freq
1 2012    5
2 2013    2
--------------------------------------------------------------- 
df1$Month: Mar
     x freq
1 2012    1
2 2013    3
3 2014    2
> 

Answer 3

The simple option to use with aggregate is the length function which will give you the length of the vector in the subset. Sometimes a little more robust is to use function(x) sum( !is.na(x) ).

Answer 4

For my aggregations I usually end up wanting to see mean and "how big is this group" (a.k.a. length). So this is my handy snippet for those occasions;

agg.mean <- aggregate(columnToMean ~ columnToAggregateOn1*columnToAggregateOn2, yourDataFrame, FUN="mean")
agg.count <- aggregate(columnToMean ~ columnToAggregateOn1*columnToAggregateOn2, yourDataFrame, FUN="length")
aggcount <- agg.count$columnToMean
agg <- cbind(aggcount, agg.mean)

Answer 5

Create a new variable Count with a value of 1 for each row:

df1["Count"] <-1

Then aggregate dataframe, summing by the Count column:

df2 <- aggregate(df1[c("Count")], by=list(Year=df1$Year, Month=df1$Month), FUN=sum, na.rm=TRUE)

Answer 6

There are plenty of wonderful answers here already, but I wanted to throw in 1 more option for those wanting to add a new column to the original dataset that contains the number of times that row is repeated.

df1$counts <- sapply(X = paste(df1$Year, df1$Month), 
                     FUN = function(x) { sum(paste(df1$Year, df1$Month) == x) })

The same could be accomplished by combining any of the above answers with the merge() function.