This is the third module of a five-module training on R I conceived and taught to my ex-colleagues back in December 2016. RStudio is the suggested IDE to go through this module. For the raw code, example data and resources visit this repo on GitHub.

Setup

Load the packages in your workspace

library(data.table)
library(dplyr)

Let’s work with iris data

data("iris")

Convert to data.table

data.table is an efficient package to perform data manipulation. It is often convenient to convert a data.frame into a data.table to leverage the advanced data manipulation features of this package.

dt <- data.table(iris)

the good thing is that data.frame class is not lost in this way.

class(dt)

Be careful when calling functions expecting one class or the other (e.g. ggplot2)

Removing NAs

Depending on the study we may want to simply exclude missing values.

iris <- iris[complete.cases(iris),]

Coalescing NAs to 0s

Another option is to replace NAs with 0s. This function will make the trick using data.table syntax.

replaceNAs = function(DT) {
  for (j in seq_len(ncol(DT)))
    set(DT,which(is.na(DT[[j]])),j,0)
}
replaceNAs(iris)

data.table presentation

data.table is a package to handle data frames. It is particularly appreciated for its speed in performing operations on large data sets. It also makes it very easy to manipulate data for those knowing the basics of SQL since you can think of a data.table object as being structured this way:

• DT[WHERE, SELECT, GROUP BY]

dplyr presentation

Quoting from CRAN dplyr package is a fast, consistent tool for working with data-frame-like objects. The main methods of this package to manipulate data are the following:

• Filter(), to select specific rows
• Arrange() the rows of your data into some order
• Mutate() your data frame to contain new columns
• Summarise() groups of your data in some way

but there are also lesser known tricks you can do with this package. Here we’ll cover just a few examples to give you an idea of its functioning.

Another awesome thing about dplyr is that it works seamlessly with the pipeline operator.

The pipeline operator from magrittr package (installed along with dplyr) allows you to create pipes. Pipes are chains which take the output from a function and feed it to the first argument of the next function. In this way it becomes very elegant and fast to query data frames.

Filtering rows

iris_setosa <- dt[Species=="setosa"] # only 'setosa' rows
iris_big <- dt[Petal.Width>2] # only rows with petal width greater than 2
iris_big <- dt[Petal.Width>2 | Petal.Length>3] # only rows with petal width greater than 2 or petal length greater than 3
setosaBig <- dt[Species=="setosa" & Petal.Width>0.5] # only rows 'setosa' and with petal width greater than 0.5
iris_sub <- dt[Species %in% c("setosa", "virginica")] # only rows setosa or virginica

setosa <- dt %>% 
  filter(Species == "setosa") # only rows setosa

Subsetting columns

keep <- c("Sepal.Length","Petal.Length","Species")
iris_keep <- dt[,keep,with=F]

iris_keep_dplyr <- select(dt,Sepal.Length,Petal.Length,Species)

iris_keep_dplyr <- dt %>% select(Sepal.Length,Petal.Length,Species)

iris_keep_dplyr <- dt %>% select(1,3,5)

Group by

tapply(dt$Petal.Length, INDEX = dt$Species,  FUN = sum)

dt[,.(sum_pet_length=sum(Petal.Length)),by=Species]

dt %>% 
  group_by(Species) %>% 
  summarise(sum_pet_length = sum(Petal.Length))

head(dt[, list(avg_pet_length = mean(Petal.Width)),
            by=.(Species, Sepal.Length)])

dt %>% 
  group_by(Species, Sepal.Length) %>% 
  summarise(avg_pet_length = mean(Petal.Width)) %>%
  head()

# Same columns, row binding
dt_1 <- dt
dt_total <- rbind(dt, dt_1 )

vector <- 1:nrow(dt)
dt_total <- cbind(dt, vector)

infoIris <- data.frame(s = levels(iris$Species), discovery = c(1950, 1960, 1961), color = c("red", "yellow", "brown"))

flowers <- data.frame(Species = c("setosa", "virginica", "tulipan", "margherita"), n = 1:4)

names(infoIris)[1] <- "Species"
left_join_base <- merge(dt, infoIris, by = "Species", all.x = T)

inner_join <- merge(dt, flowers, by = "Species")

right_join_base <- merge(dt, flowers, by = "Species", all.y = T)

setkey(dt, "Species") # We need to assign a key to join as sql way before properly doing it
infoIris_dt <- data.table(infoIris)
setkey(infoIris_dt, "Species") # event though in this case they already coincide with data.table there's no need for that because we are explicitly setting a common key
left_outer_join <- dt[infoIris_dt]

flowers_dt <- data.table(flowers)
setkey(flowers_dt, "Species") # no need to make the names coincide here because we are setting a key
inner_join <- dt[flowers_dt, nomatch = 0]

right_outer_join <- flowers_dt[dt]

left_join_dyplr <- left_join(dt, infoIris, by = "Species")

inner_join_dplyr <- inner_join(dt, flowers, by = "Species")

right_join_dyplr <- right_join(dt, flowers, by = "Species")

t <- anti_join(dt, flowers, by = "Species")

That’s it for this module! If you have gone through all this code you should have learnt the basics of two fundamentals package in R for data manipulation, data.table and dplyr.

When you’re ready, go ahead with the fourth module: R training – data visualization.

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