how to reorder a factor in a dataframe with fct_reorder?

Question

Consider the following example

> library(forcats)
> library(dplyr)
> 
> 
> dataframe <- data_frame(var = c(1,1,1,2,3,4),
+                              


        

Answer 1

Suppose your dataframe is:

dataframe <- data_frame(var = c(1,1,1,2,3,4),var2 = c(10,2,0,15,6,5))
dataframe <- dataframe %>% mutate(myfactor = factor(var))
dataframe$myfactor

[1] 1 1 1 2 3 4
Levels: 1 2 3 4

Now if you want to reorder your factor, where the order is given by the output of a certain function fun on a certain vector x then you can use fct_reorder in the following way:

dataframe$myfactor= fct_reorder(f = dataframe$myfactor,x = dataframe$var2,fun = mean)
dataframe$myfactor
[1] 1 1 1 2 3 4
Levels: 1 4 3 2

mean of dataframe$var2 for each factor will be calculated and sorted in ascending order by default to order the factor.

Answer 2

To understand fct_reoder, I created a similar but modified data frame.

> dataframe <- data_frame(var = as.factor(c(1,2,3,2,3,1,4,1,2,3,4)),var2 = c(1,5,4,2,6,2,9,8,7,6,3))

> str(dataframe)
Classes ‘tbl_df’, ‘tbl’ and 'data.frame':   11 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ var : Factor w/ 4 levels "1","2","3","4": 1 2 3 2 3 1 4 1 2 3 ...
 $ var2: num  1 5 4 2 6 2 9 8 7 6 ...

here we could see that there are 2 columns, having column 1(var) as a factor variable with levels c(1,2,3,4).

Now, if one wants to reorder the factors on the basis of the sum of their respective values(var2), one can use the fct_reorder function as below.

In order to get the difference b/w with and without fct_reorder.

At first, we would sum up the var2 on the basis of their factors(var) without using fct_reorder:

> dataframe %>% group_by(var) %>% summarise(var2=sum(var2))
# A tibble: 4 x 2
  var    var2
  <fct> <dbl>
1 1        11
2 2        14
3 3        16
4 4        12

Here we could see that the result is not ordered on the basis of the sum of var2.

Now, we would use fct_order to show the difference.

> dataframe %>% mutate(var=fct_reorder(var,var2,sum)) %>%
+ group_by(var) %>% summarise(var2=sum(var2))
# A tibble: 4 x 2
  var    var2
  <fct> <dbl>
1 1        11
2 4        12
3 2        14
4 3        16

This shows that summation is now ordered.

Likewise, fct_reorder can be used to plot the graphs(boxplot or histogram etc.) in an ordered way