[R] How to group by then count?

[Monnand]

Thank you, all! Your replies are very useful, especially Don's explanation!

One complaint I have is: the function name (talbe) is really not very
informative.

On Sun Jan 04 2015 at 5:03:47 PM MacQueen, Don <macqueen1 at llnl.gov> wrote:

> This seems to me to be a case where thinking in terms of computer
> programming concepts is getting in the way a bit. Approach it as a data
> analysis task; the S language (upon which R is based) is designed in part
> for data analysis so there is a function that does most of the job for you.
>
> (I changed your vector of strings to make the result more easily
> interpreted)
>
> > x = c("1", "1", "2", "1", "5", "2",'3','5','5','2','2')
> > tmp <- table(x)      ## counts the number of appearances of each element
> > tmp[tmp==max(tmp)]   ## finds which one occurs most often
> 2
> 4
>
> Meaning that the element '2' appears 4 times.  The table() function should
> be fast even with long vectors. Here's an example with a vector of length
> 1 million:
>
> foo <- table( sample(letters, 1e6, replace=TRUE) )
>
>
> One of the seminal books on the S language is John M Chambers' Programming
> with Data -- and I would emphasize the "with Data" part of that title.
>
> --
>
> Don MacQueen
>
> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
> 7000 East Ave., L-627
> Livermore, CA 94550
> 925-423-1062
>
>
>
>
>
> On 1/4/15, 1:02 AM, "Monnand" <monnand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Hi all,
> >
> >I thought this was a very naive problem but I have not found any solution
> >which is idiomatic to R.
> >
> >The problem is like this:
> >
> >Assuming we have vector of strings:
> > x = c("1", "1", "2", "1", "5", "2")
> >
> >We want to count number of appearance of each string. i.e. in vector x,
> >string "1" appears 3 times; "2" appears twice and "5" appears once. Then I
> >want to know which string is the majority. In this case, it is "1".
> >
> >For imperative languages like C, C++ Java and python, I would use a hash
> >table to count each strings where keys are the strings and values are the
> >number of appearance. For functional languages like clojure, there're
> >higher order functions like group-by.
> >
> >However, for R, I can hardly find a good solution to this simple problem.
> >I
> >found a hash package, which implements hash table. However, installing a
> >package simple for a hash table is really annoying for me. I did find
> >aggregate and other functions which operates on data frames. But in my
> >case, it is a simple vector. Converting it to a data frame may be not
> >desirable. (Or is it?)
> >
> >Could anyone suggest me an idiomatic way of doing such job in R? I would
> >be
> >appreciate for your help!
> >
> >-Monnand
> >
> >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
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>

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