Alternatives to stats::reshape

Question

The melt/cast functions in the reshape package are great, but I\'m not sure if there is a simple way to apply them when measured variables are of different types. For example,

Answer 1

You can process each variable separately, and join the resulting two data.frames.

# Sample data
n <- 5
d <- data.frame(
  id = 1:n,
  pt1 = sample(c("M","F"),n,replace=TRUE),
  wt1 = round(runif(n,100,200)),
  pt2 = sample(c("M","F"),n,replace=TRUE),
  wt2 = round(runif(n,100,200)),
  pt3 = sample(c("M","F"),n,replace=TRUE),
  wt3 = round(runif(n,100,200))
)
# Reshape the data.frame, one variable at a time
library(reshape2)
d1 <- melt(d, 
  id.vars="id", measure.vars=c("pt1","pt2","pt3"), 
  variable.name="patient", value.name="gender"
)
d2 <- melt(d, 
  id.vars="id", measure.vars=c("wt1","wt2","wt3"), 
  variable.name="patient", value.name="weight"
)
d1$patient <- as.numeric(gsub("pt", "", d1$patient))
d2$patient <- as.numeric(gsub("wt", "", d1$patient))
# Join the two data.frames
merge(d1, d2, by=c("id","patient"), all=TRUE)