How to replace NA with mean by group / subset?

Before answering this, I want to say that am a beginner in R. Hence, please let me know if you feel my answer is wrong.

Code:

DF[is.na(DF$length), "length"] <- mean(na.omit(telecom_original_1$length))

and apply the same for width.

DF stands for name of the data.frame.

Thanks, Parthi

Several other options:

1) with data.table's new nafill-function

library(data.table)
setDT(dat)

cols <- c("length", "width")

dat[, (cols) := lapply(.SD, function(x) nafill(x, type = "const", fill = mean(x, na.rm = TRUE)))
    , by = taxa
    , .SDcols = cols][]

2) with zoo's na.aggregate-function

library(zoo)
library(data.table)
setDT(dat)

cols <- c("length", "width")

dat[, (cols) := lapply(.SD, na.aggregate)
    , by = taxa
    , .SDcols = cols][]

The default function from na.aggregate is mean; if you want to use another function you should specify that with the FUN-parameter (example: FUN = median). See also the help-file with ?na.aggregate.

Of course you can also use this in the tidyverse:

library(dplyr)
library(zoo)

dat %>% 
  group_by(taxa) %>% 
  mutate_at(cols, na.aggregate)

Not my own technique I saw it on the boards a while back:

dat <- read.table(text = "id    taxa        length  width
101   collembola  2.1     0.9
102   mite        0.9     0.7
103   mite        1.1     0.8
104   collembola  NA      NA
105   collembola  1.5     0.5
106   mite        NA      NA", header=TRUE)


library(plyr)
impute.mean <- function(x) replace(x, is.na(x), mean(x, na.rm = TRUE))
dat2 <- ddply(dat, ~ taxa, transform, length = impute.mean(length),
     width = impute.mean(width))

dat2[order(dat2$id), ] #plyr orders by group so we have to reorder

Edit A non plyr approach with a for loop:

for (i in which(sapply(dat, is.numeric))) {
    for (j in which(is.na(dat[, i]))) {
        dat[j, i] <- mean(dat[dat[, "taxa"] == dat[j, "taxa"], i],  na.rm = TRUE)
    }
}

Edit many moons later here is a data.table & dplyr approach:

data.table

library(data.table)
setDT(dat)

dat[, length := impute.mean(length), by = taxa][,
    width := impute.mean(width), by = taxa]

dplyr

library(dplyr)

dat %>%
    group_by(taxa) %>%
    mutate(
        length = impute.mean(length),
        width = impute.mean(width)  
    )