Relative frequencies / proportions with dplyr

Question

Suppose I want to calculate the proportion of different values within each group. For example, using the mtcars data, how do I calculate the relative f

Answer 1

You can use count() function, which has however a different behaviour depending on the version of dplyr:

• dplyr 0.7.1: returns an ungrouped table: you need to group again by am

• dplyr < 0.7.1: returns a grouped table, so no need to group again, although you might want to ungroup() for later manipulations

dplyr 0.7.1

mtcars %>%
  count(am, gear) %>%
  group_by(am) %>%
  mutate(freq = n / sum(n))

dplyr < 0.7.1

mtcars %>%
  count(am, gear) %>%
  mutate(freq = n / sum(n))

This results into a grouped table, if you want to use it for further analysis, it might be useful to remove the grouped attribute with ungroup().