Counting the number of elements with the values of x in a vector

Question

I have a vector of numbers:

numbers <- c(4,23,4,23,5,43,54,56,657,67,67,435,
         453,435,324,34,456,56,567,65,34,435)

How can I hav

Answer 1

A method that is relatively fast on long vectors and gives a convenient output is to use lengths(split(numbers, numbers)) (note the S at the end of lengths):

# Make some integer vectors of different sizes
set.seed(123)
x <- sample.int(1e3, 1e4, replace = TRUE)
xl <- sample.int(1e3, 1e6, replace = TRUE)
xxl <-sample.int(1e3, 1e7, replace = TRUE)

# Number of times each value appears in x:
a <- lengths(split(x,x))

# Number of times the value 64 appears:
a["64"]
#~ 64
#~ 15

# Occurences of the first 10 values
a[1:10]
#~ 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 
#~ 13 12  6 14 12  5 13 14 11 14 

The output is simply a named vector.
The speed appears comparable to rle proposed by JBecker and even a bit faster on very long vectors. Here is a microbenchmark in R 3.6.2 with some of the functions proposed:

library(microbenchmark)

f1 <- function(vec) lengths(split(vec,vec))
f2 <- function(vec) table(vec)
f3 <- function(vec) rle(sort(vec))
f4 <- function(vec) plyr::count(vec)

microbenchmark(split = f1(x),
               table = f2(x),
               rle = f3(x),
               plyr = f4(x))
#~ Unit: microseconds
#~   expr      min        lq      mean    median        uq      max neval  cld
#~  split  402.024  423.2445  492.3400  446.7695  484.3560 2970.107   100  b  
#~  table 1234.888 1290.0150 1378.8902 1333.2445 1382.2005 3203.332   100    d
#~    rle  227.685  238.3845  264.2269  245.7935  279.5435  378.514   100 a   
#~   plyr  758.866  793.0020  866.9325  843.2290  894.5620 2346.407   100   c 

microbenchmark(split = f1(xl),
               table = f2(xl),
               rle = f3(xl),
               plyr = f4(xl))
#~ Unit: milliseconds
#~   expr       min        lq      mean    median        uq       max neval cld
#~  split  21.96075  22.42355  26.39247  23.24847  24.60674  82.88853   100 ab 
#~  table 100.30543 104.05397 111.62963 105.54308 110.28732 168.27695   100   c
#~    rle  19.07365  20.64686  23.71367  21.30467  23.22815  78.67523   100 a  
#~   plyr  24.33968  25.21049  29.71205  26.50363  27.75960  92.02273   100  b 

microbenchmark(split = f1(xxl),
               table = f2(xxl),
               rle = f3(xxl),
               plyr = f4(xxl))
#~ Unit: milliseconds
#~   expr       min        lq      mean    median        uq       max neval  cld
#~  split  296.4496  310.9702  342.6766  332.5098  374.6485  421.1348   100 a   
#~  table 1151.4551 1239.9688 1283.8998 1288.0994 1323.1833 1385.3040   100    d
#~    rle  399.9442  430.8396  464.2605  471.4376  483.2439  555.9278   100   c 
#~   plyr  350.0607  373.1603  414.3596  425.1436  437.8395  506.0169   100  b  

Importantly, the only function that also counts the number of missing values NA is plyr::count. These can also be obtained separately using sum(is.na(vec))