Introduction
Welcome to my series of blog posts about my data manipulation package, {poorman}. For those of you that don’t know, {poorman} is aiming to be a replication of {dplyr} but using only {base} R, and therefore be completely dependency free. What’s nice about this series is that if you would rather just use {dplyr}, then that’s absolutely OK! By highlighting {poorman} functionality, this series of blog posts simultaneously highlights {dplyr} functionality too! However I sometimes also describe how I developed the internals of {poorman}, often highlighting useful {base} R tips and tricks.
Since my last blog post about {poorman}, versions 0.2.2 and 0.2.3 have been released, bringing with them a whole host of new functions and features. In today’s blog post we will be taking a look at some of these new features. Given the sheer amount of features this release brings, we won’t be focusing on the internals of any of these functions. Instead, we will simply be taking a look at what some of them can do.
across()
One of the newer features in {dplyr}, across() is intended to eventually replace the scoped variants (_if, _at, _all) of the “single table” verb functions which have now been superseded. These functions will supposedly remain within {dplyr} for “several years” still, giving developers plenty of time to update their code.
across() makes it easy to apply the same transformation to multiple columns, allowing you to use poor-select (or tidy-select) semantics inside of summarise() and mutate(). Let’s take a look at the function in action.
library(poorman, warn.conflicts = FALSE)
iris %>%
group_by(Species) %>%
summarise(across(.cols = starts_with("Sepal"), .fn = mean))
# Species Sepal.Length Sepal.Width
# 1 setosa 5.006 3.428
# 2 versicolor 5.936 2.770
# 3 virginica 6.588 2.974In the above code chunk, we take the iris dataset and group it by the Species column; then we look to summarise across all columns which start with the string "Sepal" (Sepal.Length and Sepal.Width) by taking the mean of those columns within each Species group. Let’s take a look at a more complex example.
iris %>%
group_by(Species) %>%
summarise(across(.cols = contains("Width"), .fn = list(mean, sd)))
# Species Sepal.Width_1 Sepal.Width_2 Petal.Width_1 Petal.Width_2
# 1 setosa 3.428 0.3790644 0.246 0.1053856
# 2 versicolor 2.770 0.3137983 1.326 0.1977527
# 3 virginica 2.974 0.3224966 2.026 0.2746501So here, we are saying give me the mean and standard devitaion across all columns containing the string "Width" for each Species of iris flower. Notice how the output is named, the function will give the columns numbers to represent the functional output, i.e. here _1 represents the mean and _2 represents the standard deviation. You can control the names yourself but providing them to the .names argument.
iris %>%
group_by(Species) %>%
summarise(across(
.cols = contains("Width"),
.fn = list(mean, sd),
.names = c(
"sepal_width_mean", "sepal_width_sd", "petal_width_mean", "petal_width_sd"
)
))
# Species sepal_width_mean sepal_width_sd petal_width_mean petal_width_sd
# 1 setosa 3.428 0.3790644 0.246 0.1053856
# 2 versicolor 2.770 0.3137983 1.326 0.1977527
# 3 virginica 2.974 0.3224966 2.026 0.2746501This is slightly different to how {dplyr} works since it imports {glue}, but remember, {poorman} aims to be dependency free. This functionality will be expanded upon in future releases of {poorman}.
case_when()
This function allows you to vectorise multiple if_else() statements. It is an R equivalent of the SQL CASE WHEN statement. If no cases match, NA is returned. The syntax for the function is a sequence of two-sided formulas. The left hand side determines which values match the particular case whereas the right hand side provides the replacement value.
x <- 1:50
case_when(
x %% 35 == 0 ~ "fizz buzz",
x %% 5 == 0 ~ "fizz",
x %% 7 == 0 ~ "buzz",
TRUE ~ as.character(x)
)
# [1] "1" "2" "3" "4" "fizz" "6" "buzz"
# [8] "8" "9" "fizz" "11" "12" "13" "buzz"
# [15] "fizz" "16" "17" "18" "19" "fizz" "buzz"
# [22] "22" "23" "24" "fizz" "26" "27" "buzz"
# [29] "29" "fizz" "31" "32" "33" "34" "fizz buzz"
# [36] "36" "37" "38" "39" "fizz" "41" "buzz"
# [43] "43" "44" "fizz" "46" "47" "48" "buzz"
# [50] "fizz"Like an if statement, the arguments are evaluated in order, so you must proceed from the most specific to the most general. case_when() is particularly useful inside mutate() when you want to create a new variable that relies on a complex combination of existing variables.
mtcars %>%
mutate(efficient = case_when(mpg > 25 ~ TRUE, TRUE ~ FALSE))
# mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb efficient
# Mazda RX4 21.0 6 160.0 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 4 4 FALSE
# Mazda RX4 Wag 21.0 6 160.0 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 4 4 FALSE
# Datsun 710 22.8 4 108.0 93 3.85 2.320 18.61 1 1 4 1 FALSE
# Hornet 4 Drive 21.4 6 258.0 110 3.08 3.215 19.44 1 0 3 1 FALSE
# Hornet Sportabout 18.7 8 360.0 175 3.15 3.440 17.02 0 0 3 2 FALSE
# Valiant 18.1 6 225.0 105 2.76 3.460 20.22 1 0 3 1 FALSE
# Duster 360 14.3 8 360.0 245 3.21 3.570 15.84 0 0 3 4 FALSE
# Merc 240D 24.4 4 146.7 62 3.69 3.190 20.00 1 0 4 2 FALSE
# Merc 230 22.8 4 140.8 95 3.92 3.150 22.90 1 0 4 2 FALSE
# Merc 280 19.2 6 167.6 123 3.92 3.440 18.30 1 0 4 4 FALSE
# Merc 280C 17.8 6 167.6 123 3.92 3.440 18.90 1 0 4 4 FALSE
# Merc 450SE 16.4 8 275.8 180 3.07 4.070 17.40 0 0 3 3 FALSE
# Merc 450SL 17.3 8 275.8 180 3.07 3.730 17.60 0 0 3 3 FALSE
# Merc 450SLC 15.2 8 275.8 180 3.07 3.780 18.00 0 0 3 3 FALSE
# Cadillac Fleetwood 10.4 8 472.0 205 2.93 5.250 17.98 0 0 3 4 FALSE
# Lincoln Continental 10.4 8 460.0 215 3.00 5.424 17.82 0 0 3 4 FALSE
# Chrysler Imperial 14.7 8 440.0 230 3.23 5.345 17.42 0 0 3 4 FALSE
# Fiat 128 32.4 4 78.7 66 4.08 2.200 19.47 1 1 4 1 TRUE
# Honda Civic 30.4 4 75.7 52 4.93 1.615 18.52 1 1 4 2 TRUE
# Toyota Corolla 33.9 4 71.1 65 4.22 1.835 19.90 1 1 4 1 TRUE
# Toyota Corona 21.5 4 120.1 97 3.70 2.465 20.01 1 0 3 1 FALSE
# Dodge Challenger 15.5 8 318.0 150 2.76 3.520 16.87 0 0 3 2 FALSE
# AMC Javelin 15.2 8 304.0 150 3.15 3.435 17.30 0 0 3 2 FALSE
# Camaro Z28 13.3 8 350.0 245 3.73 3.840 15.41 0 0 3 4 FALSE
# Pontiac Firebird 19.2 8 400.0 175 3.08 3.845 17.05 0 0 3 2 FALSE
# Fiat X1-9 27.3 4 79.0 66 4.08 1.935 18.90 1 1 4 1 TRUE
# Porsche 914-2 26.0 4 120.3 91 4.43 2.140 16.70 0 1 5 2 TRUE
# Lotus Europa 30.4 4 95.1 113 3.77 1.513 16.90 1 1 5 2 TRUE
# Ford Pantera L 15.8 8 351.0 264 4.22 3.170 14.50 0 1 5 4 FALSE
# Ferrari Dino 19.7 6 145.0 175 3.62 2.770 15.50 0 1 5 6 FALSE
# Maserati Bora 15.0 8 301.0 335 3.54 3.570 14.60 0 1 5 8 FALSE
# Volvo 142E 21.4 4 121.0 109 4.11 2.780 18.60 1 1 4 2 FALSErename_with()
rename_with() acts like rename(), only it allows you to rename columns with a function. In the below example, we rename the columns of iris to be upper case.
rename_with(iris, toupper) %>% head()
# SEPAL.LENGTH SEPAL.WIDTH PETAL.LENGTH PETAL.WIDTH SPECIES
# 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
# 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
# 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
# 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa
# 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa
# 6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosaHowever we can have more control over which columns we rename by making use of the .cols parameter and poor-select selection semantics.
rename_with(iris, toupper, contains("Petal")) %>% head()
# Sepal.Length Sepal.Width PETAL.LENGTH PETAL.WIDTH Species
# 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
# 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
# 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
# 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa
# 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa
# 6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosaConclusion
This post has demonstrated some of the capabilities of the {poorman} (and therefore {dplyr}) package. The v0.2.2 and v0.2.3 releases actually includes plenty more features and functions so be sure to check out the release page.
If you are interested in taking a closer look at how have coded these functions, you can see the code on the relevant {poorman} GitHub page.
If you’d like to show your support for {poorman}, please consider giving the package a Star on Github as it gives me that boost of dopamine needed to continue development.