On 13/09/2007 5:47 AM, T.Lok wrote: > Yesterday I spend the whole day struggling on how to get > the maximum value of "y" for every unique value of "x" > from the dataframe "test". In the R Book (Crawley, 2007) > an example of this can be found on page 121. I tried to do > it this way, but I failed. > > In the end, I figured out how to get it working (first > order, and afterwards use !duplicated()). My question is: > why does it not work with the unique() function on p. 121 > ( > i.e. test[rev(order(x)),][unique(y),]) ? > > As a simple example, I used to following syntax: > >> x <- c("A","A","B","B","C","C","D") >> y <- c(1,2,1,1,2,3,1) >> z <- c("yes","yes","no","yes","no","no","no") >> test <- data.frame(x,y,z) >> test > > x y z > 1 A 1 yes > 2 A 2 yes > 3 B 1 no > 4 B 1 yes > 5 C 2 no > 6 C 3 no > 7 D 1 no > >> test[rev(order(test$y, test$z)),][unique(test$x),] > > x y z > 6 C 3 no > 2 A 2 yes > 5 C 2 no > 4 B 1 yes > > # this clearly does not give a unique value for x, since > there are 2 C's and no D!
You are trying to index by the unique values of x. But x is a factor, so this doesn't do anything even close to what you wanted. > >> test[rev(order(test$y, test$z)),][!duplicated(test$x),] > > x y z > 6 C 3 no > 5 C 2 no > 1 A 1 yes > 3 B 1 no > You rearranged the rows of test but not of test$x. This would work: test <- test[rev(order(test$y, test$z)),] test[!duplicated(test$x),] > # this also doesn't work > # then I thought, maybe first use the order() function, > then unique() > >> test[rev(order(test$y, test$z)),] > > x y z > 6 C 3 no > 2 A 2 yes > 5 C 2 no > 4 B 1 yes > 1 A 1 yes > 7 D 1 no > 3 B 1 no > >> test1 <- test[rev(order(test$y, test$z)),] >> test1[unique(test1$x),] > > x y z > 5 C 2 no > 6 C 3 no > 2 A 2 yes > 4 B 1 yes > > # still no unique values for x > >> test1[!duplicated(test1$x),] > > x y z > 6 C 3 no > 2 A 2 yes > 4 B 1 yes > 7 D 1 no > > # finally I get unique values for x, for the maximum value > of y (and z). But why does this not work when giving the > order() and !duplicated() command simultaneously? > And why does only !duplicated() work, and not unique()? I think both questions are answered above. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.