How to group by all but one columns?
You can do this using standard evaluation (group_by_
instead of group_by
):
# Fake data
set.seed(492)
dat = data.frame(value=rnorm(1000), g1=sample(LETTERS,1000,replace=TRUE),
g2=sample(letters,1000,replace=TRUE), g3=sample(1:10, replace=TRUE),
other=sample(c("red","green","black"),1000,replace=TRUE))
dat %>% group_by_(.dots=names(dat)[-grep("value", names(dat))]) %>%
summarise(meanValue=mean(value))
g1 g2 g3 other meanValue <fctr> <fctr> <int> <fctr> <dbl> 1 A a 2 green 0.89281475 2 A b 2 red -0.03558775 3 A b 5 black -1.79184218 4 A c 10 black 0.17518610 5 A e 5 black 0.25830392 ...
See this vignette for more on standard vs. non-standard evaluation in dplyr
.
UPDATE for dplyr
0.7.0
To address @ÖmerAn's comment: It looks like group_by_at
is the way to go in dplyr
0.7.0 (someone please correct me if I'm wrong about this). For example:
dat %>%
group_by_at(setdiff(names(dat), "value")) %>%
summarise(meanValue=mean(value))
# Groups: g1, g2, g3 [?] g1 g2 g3 other meanValue <fctr> <fctr> <int> <fctr> <dbl> 1 A a 2 green 0.89281475 2 A b 2 red -0.03558775 3 A b 5 black -1.79184218 4 A c 10 black 0.17518610 5 A e 5 black 0.25830392 6 A e 5 red -0.81879788 7 A e 7 green 0.30836054 8 A f 2 green 0.05537047 9 A g 1 black 1.00156405 10 A g 10 black 1.26884303 # ... with 949 more rows
Let's confirm both methods give the same output (in dplyr
0.7.0):
new = dat %>%
group_by_at(setdiff(names(dat), "value")) %>%
summarise(meanValue=mean(value))
old = dat %>%
group_by_(.dots=names(dat)[-grep("value", names(dat))]) %>%
summarise(meanValue=mean(value))
identical(old, new)
# [1] TRUE
Building on the @eipi10's dplyr 0.7.0 edit, group_by_at
appears to be the right function for this job. However, if you are simply looking to omit column "x", then you can use:
new2.0 <- dat %>%
group_by_at(vars(-x)) %>%
summarize(mean_value = mean(value))
Using @eipi10's example data:
# Fake data
set.seed(492)
dat <- data.frame(value = rnorm(1000),
g1 = sample(LETTERS, 1000, replace = TRUE),
g2 = sample(letters, 1000, replace = TRUE),
g3 = sample(1:10, replace = TRUE),
other = sample(c("red", "green", "black"), 1000, replace = TRUE))
new <- dat %>%
group_by_at(names(dat)[-grep("value", names(dat))]) %>%
summarise(meanValue = mean(value))
new2.0 <- dat %>%
group_by_at(vars(-value)) %>%
summarize(meanValue = mean(value))
identical(new, new2.0)
# [1] TRUE
dplyr version 1.0+
In dplyr 1.0.0 coming up, the _at
functions are falling into the superseded lifecycle (i.e. while they remain in dplyr
for the foreseeable future, there are now better alternatives that are more actively developed). The new way to accomplish this is via the across
function:
df %>%
group_by(across(c(-hp)))
dplyr v 0.7+
A small update on this question because I stumbled across this myself and found an elegant solution with current version of dplyr
(0.7.4):
Inside group_by_at()
, you can supply the names of columns the same way as in the select()
function using vars()
. This enables us to group by everything but one column (hp
in this example) by writing:
library(dplyr)
df <- as_tibble(mtcars, rownames = "car")
df %>% group_by_at(vars(-hp))