Combine a list of data frames into one data frame

Question

I have code that at one place ends up with a list of data frames which I really want to convert to a single big data frame.

I got some pointers from an earlier ques

Answer 1

Code:

library(microbenchmark)

dflist <- vector(length=10,mode="list")
for(i in 1:100)
{
  dflist[[i]] <- data.frame(a=runif(n=260),b=runif(n=260),
                            c=rep(LETTERS,10),d=rep(LETTERS,10))
}


mb <- microbenchmark(
plyr::rbind.fill(dflist),
dplyr::bind_rows(dflist),
data.table::rbindlist(dflist),
plyr::ldply(dflist,data.frame),
do.call("rbind",dflist),
times=1000)

ggplot2::autoplot(mb)

Session:

R version 3.3.0 (2016-05-03)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 7 x64 (build 7601) Service Pack 1

> packageVersion("plyr")
[1] ‘1.8.4’
> packageVersion("dplyr")
[1] ‘0.5.0’
> packageVersion("data.table")
[1] ‘1.9.6’

---

UPDATE: Rerun 31-Jan-2018. Ran on the same computer. New versions of packages. Added seed for seed lovers.

set.seed(21)
library(microbenchmark)

dflist <- vector(length=10,mode="list")
for(i in 1:100)
{
  dflist[[i]] <- data.frame(a=runif(n=260),b=runif(n=260),
                            c=rep(LETTERS,10),d=rep(LETTERS,10))
}


mb <- microbenchmark(
  plyr::rbind.fill(dflist),
  dplyr::bind_rows(dflist),
  data.table::rbindlist(dflist),
  plyr::ldply(dflist,data.frame),
  do.call("rbind",dflist),
  times=1000)

ggplot2::autoplot(mb)+theme_bw()


R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 7 x64 (build 7601) Service Pack 1

> packageVersion("plyr")
[1] ‘1.8.4’
> packageVersion("dplyr")
[1] ‘0.7.2’
> packageVersion("data.table")
[1] ‘1.10.4’

---

UPDATE: Rerun 06-Aug-2019.

set.seed(21)
library(microbenchmark)

dflist <- vector(length=10,mode="list")
for(i in 1:100)
{
  dflist[[i]] <- data.frame(a=runif(n=260),b=runif(n=260),
                            c=rep(LETTERS,10),d=rep(LETTERS,10))
}


mb <- microbenchmark(
  plyr::rbind.fill(dflist),
  dplyr::bind_rows(dflist),
  data.table::rbindlist(dflist),
  plyr::ldply(dflist,data.frame),
  do.call("rbind",dflist),
  purrr::map_df(dflist,dplyr::bind_rows),
  times=1000)

ggplot2::autoplot(mb)+theme_bw()

R version 3.6.0 (2019-04-26)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas/libblas.so.3
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopenblasp-r0.2.20.so

packageVersion("plyr")
packageVersion("dplyr")
packageVersion("data.table")
packageVersion("purrr")

>> packageVersion("plyr")
[1] ‘1.8.4’
>> packageVersion("dplyr")
[1] ‘0.8.3’
>> packageVersion("data.table")
[1] ‘1.12.2’
>> packageVersion("purrr")
[1] ‘0.3.2’

Answer 2

Use bind_rows() from the dplyr package:

bind_rows(list_of_dataframes, .id = "column_label")

Answer 3

Here's another way this can be done (just adding it to the answers because reduce is a very effective functional tool that is often overlooked as a replacement for loops. In this particular case, neither of these are significantly faster than do.call)

using base R:

df <- Reduce(rbind, listOfDataFrames)

or, using the tidyverse:

library(tidyverse) # or, library(dplyr); library(purrr)
df <- listOfDataFrames %>% reduce(bind_rows)

Answer 4

There is also bind_rows(x, ...) in dplyr.

> system.time({ df.Base <- do.call("rbind", listOfDataFrames) })
   user  system elapsed 
   0.08    0.00    0.07 
> 
> system.time({ df.dplyr <- as.data.frame(bind_rows(listOfDataFrames)) })
   user  system elapsed 
   0.01    0.00    0.02 
> 
> identical(df.Base, df.dplyr)
[1] TRUE

Answer 5

One other option is to use a plyr function:

df <- ldply(listOfDataFrames, data.frame)

This is a little slower than the original:

> system.time({ df <- do.call("rbind", listOfDataFrames) })
   user  system elapsed 
   0.25    0.00    0.25 
> system.time({ df2 <- ldply(listOfDataFrames, data.frame) })
   user  system elapsed 
   0.30    0.00    0.29
> identical(df, df2)
[1] TRUE

My guess is that using do.call("rbind", ...) is going to be the fastest approach that you will find unless you can do something like (a) use a matrices instead of a data.frames and (b) preallocate the final matrix and assign to it rather than growing it.

Edit 1:

Based on Hadley's comment, here's the latest version of rbind.fill from CRAN:

> system.time({ df3 <- rbind.fill(listOfDataFrames) })
   user  system elapsed 
   0.24    0.00    0.23 
> identical(df, df3)
[1] TRUE

This is easier than rbind, and marginally faster (these timings hold up over multiple runs). And as far as I understand it, the version of plyr on github is even faster than this.

Answer 6

The only thing that the solutions with data.table are missing is the identifier column to know from which dataframe in the list the data is coming from.

Something like this:

df_id <- data.table::rbindlist(listOfDataFrames, idcol = TRUE)

The idcol parameter adds a column (.id) identifying the origin of the dataframe contained in the list. The result would look to something like this:

.id a         b           c
1   u   -0.05315128 -1.31975849 
1   b   -1.00404849 1.15257952  
1   y   1.17478229  -0.91043925 
1   q   -1.65488899 0.05846295  
1   c   -1.43730524 0.95245909  
1   b   0.56434313  0.93813197