Extract row corresponding to minimum value of a variable by group

Question

I wish to (1) group data by one variable (State), (2) within each group find the row of minimum value of another variable (Employees), and (3) extr

Answer 1

Corrected plyr solution:

ddply(df, .(State), function(x) x[which.min(x$Employees),])
#   State Company Employees
# 1    AK       D        24
# 2    RI       E        19

thanks to @joel.wilson

Answer 2

Here a dplyr solution ( Note that I am not a regular user ):

library(dplyr)    
data %>% 
    group_by(State) %>% 
    slice(which.min(Employees))

Answer 3

In base you can use ave to get min per group and compare this with Employees and get a logical vector to subset the data.frame.

data[data$Employees == ave(data$Employees, data$State, FUN=min),]
#  State Company Employees
#4    AK       D        24
#5    RI       E        19

Or compare it already in the function.

data[as.logical(ave(data$Employees, data$State, FUN=function(x) x==min(x))),]
#data[ave(data$Employees, data$State, FUN=function(x) x==min(x))==1,] #Variant
#  State Company Employees
#4    AK       D        24
#5    RI       E        19

Answer 4

The base function by is often useful for working with block data in data.frames. For example

by(data, data$State, function(x) x[which.min(x$Employees), ] )

It does return the data in a list, but you can collapse that with

do.call(rbind, by(data, data$State, function(x) x[which.min(x$Employees), ] ))

Answer 5

Slightly more elegant:

library(data.table)
DT[ , .SD[which.min(Employees)], by = State]

   State Company Employees
1:    AK       D        24
2:    RI       E        19

---

Slighly less elegant than using .SD, but a bit faster (for data with many groups):

DT[DT[ , .I[which.min(Employees)], by = State]$V1]

Also, just replace the expression which.min(Employees) with Employees == min(Employees), if your data set has multiple identical min values and you'd like to subset all of them.

See also Subset rows corresponding to max value by group using data.table.

Answer 6

As this is Google's top hit, I thought I would add some additional options which I find useful to know. The idea is basically to arrange once by Employees and then just take the uniques per State

Either using data.table

library(data.table)
unique(setDT(data)[order(Employees)], by = "State")
#    State Company Employees
# 1:    RI       E        19
# 2:    AK       D        24

---

Alternatively, we could also first order and then subset .SD. Both of those operations were optimized in the resent data.table versions and order is seemingly triggers data.table:::forderv, while .SD[1L] triggers Gforce

setDT(data)[order(Employees), .SD[1L], by = State, verbose = TRUE] # <- Added verbose
# order optimisation is on, i changed from 'order(...)' to 'forder(DT, ...)'.
# i clause present and columns used in by detected, only these subset: State 
# Finding groups using forderv ... 0 sec
# Finding group sizes from the positions (can be avoided to save RAM) ... 0 sec
# Getting back original order ... 0 sec
# lapply optimization changed j from '.SD[1L]' to 'list(Company[1L], Employees[1L])'
# GForce optimized j to 'list(`g[`(Company, 1L), `g[`(Employees, 1L))'
# Making each group and running j (GForce TRUE) ... 0 secs
#    State Company Employees
# 1:    RI       E        19
# 2:    AK       D        24

---

Or dplyr

library(dplyr)
data %>% 
  arrange(Employees) %>% 
  distinct(State, .keep_all = TRUE)
#   State Company Employees
# 1    RI       E        19
# 2    AK       D        24

---

Another interesting idea borrowed from @Khashaas awesome answer (with a small modification in form of mult = "first" in order to handle multiple matches) is to first find minimum per group and then perform a binary join back. The advantage of this is both the utilization of data.tables gmin function (which skips the evaluation overhead) and the binary join feature

tmp <- setDT(data)[, .(Employees = min(Employees)), by = State]
data[tmp, on = .(State, Employees), mult = "first"]
#    State Company Employees
# 1:    AK       D        24
# 2:    RI       E        19

---

Some benchmarks

library(data.table)
library(dplyr)
library(plyr)
library(stringi)
library(microbenchmark)

set.seed(123)
N <- 1e6
data <- data.frame(State = stri_rand_strings(N, 2, '[A-Z]'),
                   Employees = sample(N*10, N, replace = TRUE))
DT <- copy(data)
setDT(DT)
DT2 <- copy(DT)
str(DT)
str(DT2)

microbenchmark("(data.table) .SD[which.min]: " = DT[ , .SD[which.min(Employees)], by = State],
               "(data.table) .I[which.min]: " = DT[DT[ , .I[which.min(Employees)], by = State]$V1],
               "(data.table) order/unique: " = unique(DT[order(Employees)], by = "State"),
               "(data.table) order/.SD[1L]: " = DT[order(Employees), .SD[1L], by = State],
               "(data.table) self join (on):" = {
                 tmp <- DT[, .(Employees = min(Employees)), by = State]
                 DT[tmp, on = .(State, Employees), mult = "first"]},
               "(data.table) self join (setkey):" = {
                 tmp <- DT2[, .(Employees = min(Employees)), by = State] 
                 setkey(tmp, State, Employees)
                 setkey(DT2, State, Employees)
                 DT2[tmp, mult = "first"]},
               "(dplyr) slice(which.min): " = data %>% group_by(State) %>% slice(which.min(Employees)),
               "(dplyr) arrange/distinct: " = data %>% arrange(Employees) %>% distinct(State, .keep_all = TRUE),
               "(dplyr) arrange/group_by/slice: " = data %>% arrange(Employees) %>% group_by(State) %>% slice(1),
               "(plyr) ddply/which.min: " = ddply(data, .(State), function(x) x[which.min(x$Employees),]),
               "(base) by: " = do.call(rbind, by(data, data$State, function(x) x[which.min(x$Employees), ])))


# Unit: milliseconds
#                             expr        min         lq       mean     median         uq       max neval      cld
#    (data.table) .SD[which.min]:   119.66086  125.49202  145.57369  129.61172  152.02872  267.5713   100    d    
#     (data.table) .I[which.min]:    12.84948   13.66673   19.51432   13.97584   15.17900  109.5438   100 a       
#      (data.table) order/unique:    52.91915   54.63989   64.39212   59.15254   61.71133  177.1248   100  b      
#     (data.table) order/.SD[1L]:    51.41872   53.22794   58.17123   55.00228   59.00966  145.0341   100  b      
#     (data.table) self join (on):   44.37256   45.67364   50.32378   46.24578   50.69411  137.4724   100  b      
# (data.table) self join (setkey):   14.30543   15.28924   18.63739   15.58667   16.01017  106.0069   100 a       
#       (dplyr) slice(which.min):    82.60453   83.64146   94.06307   84.82078   90.09772  186.0848   100   c     
#       (dplyr) arrange/distinct:   344.81603  360.09167  385.52661  379.55676  395.29463  491.3893   100     e   
# (dplyr) arrange/group_by/slice:   367.95924  383.52719  414.99081  397.93646  425.92478  557.9553   100      f  
#         (plyr) ddply/which.min:   506.55354  530.22569  568.99493  552.65068  601.04582  727.9248   100       g 
#                      (base) by:  1220.38286 1291.70601 1340.56985 1344.86291 1382.38067 1512.5377   100        h