Select first and last row from grouped data

Something like:

library(dplyr)

df <- data.frame(id=c(1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3),
                 stopId=c("a","b","c","a","b","c","a","b","c"),
                 stopSequence=c(1,2,3,3,1,4,3,1,2))

first_last <- function(x) {
  bind_rows(slice(x, 1), slice(x, n()))
}

df %>%
  group_by(id) %>%
  arrange(stopSequence) %>%
  do(first_last(.)) %>%
  ungroup

## Source: local data frame [6 x 3]
## 
##   id stopId stopSequence
## 1  1      a            1
## 2  1      c            3
## 3  2      b            1
## 4  2      c            4
## 5  3      b            1
## 6  3      a            3

With do you can pretty much perform any number of operations on the group but @jeremycg's answer is way more appropriate for just this task.

Not dplyr, but it's much more direct using data.table:

library(data.table)
setDT(df)
df[ df[order(id, stopSequence), .I[c(1L,.N)], by=id]$V1 ]
#    id stopId stopSequence
# 1:  1      a            1
# 2:  1      c            3
# 3:  2      b            1
# 4:  2      c            4
# 5:  3      b            1
# 6:  3      a            3

More detailed explanation:

# 1) get row numbers of first/last observations from each group
#    * basically, we sort the table by id/stopSequence, then,
#      grouping by id, name the row numbers of the first/last
#      observations for each id; since this operation produces
#      a data.table
#    * .I is data.table shorthand for the row number
#    * here, to be maximally explicit, I've named the variable V1
#      as row_num to give other readers of my code a clearer
#      understanding of what operation is producing what variable
first_last = df[order(id, stopSequence), .(row_num = .I[c(1L,.N)]), by=id]
idx = first_last$row_num

# 2) extract rows by number
df[idx]

Be sure to check out the Getting Started wiki for getting the data.table basics covered

There is probably a faster way:

df %>%
  group_by(id) %>%
  arrange(stopSequence) %>%
  filter(row_number()==1 | row_number()==n())

Just for completeness: You can pass slice a vector of indices:

df %>% arrange(stopSequence) %>% group_by(id) %>% slice(c(1,n()))

which gives

  id stopId stopSequence
1  1      a            1
2  1      c            3
3  2      b            1
4  2      c            4
5  3      b            1
6  3      a            3