Flagging groups in which all members fulfill a certain requirement in R

Question

Suppose the data below:

GroupId <-          c(1,1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3)
IndId <-            c(1,1,2,2,3,4,4,5,5)
IndGroupProperty <- c(1,2,1,2,3,3,4,5,6)
PropertyType <-     c(1,2,1,2,2,2,1,2,2)

df <- data.frame(GroupId, IndId, IndGroupProperty, PropertyType)
df

These are multi-level data, where each group GroupId consists of one or multiple individuals IndId having access to one or more properties IndGroupProperty, which are unique to their respective group (i.e. property 1 belongs to group 1 and no other group). These properties each belong to a type PropertyType.

The task is to flag each row with a dummy variable where there is at least one type-1 property belonging to each individual in the group.

For our sample data, this simply is:

ValidGroup <-       c(1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0)
df <- data.frame(df, ValidGroup)
df

The first four rows are flagged with a 1, because each individual (1, 2) of group (1) has access to a type-1 property (1). The three subsequent rows belong to group (2), in which only individual (4) has access to a type-1 property (4). Thus these are not flagged (0). The last two rows also receives no flag. Group (3) consists only of a single individual (5) with access to two type-2 properties (5, 6).

I have looked into several commands: levels seems to lack group support; getGroups in the nlme package does not like the input of my real data; I guess that there might be something useful in doBy, but summaryBy does not seem to take levels as a function.

Solution EDIT: dplyr solution by Henrik wrapped into a function:

foobar <- function(object, group, ind, type){
groupvar <- deparse(substitute(group)) 
indvar <- deparse(substitute(ind)) 
typevar <- deparse(substitute(type)) 
eval(substitute(
object[, c(groupvar, indvar, typevar)] %.%
  group_by(group, ind) %.%
  mutate(type1 = any(type == 1))  %.%
  group_by(group, add = FALSE) %.%
  mutate(ValidGroup = all(type1) * 1) %.%
  select(-type1)
  ))
}

Answer 1

You could also try ave:

# for each individual within group, calculate number of 1s in PropertyType
v1 <- with(df, ave(PropertyType, list(GroupId, IndId), FUN = function(x) sum(x == 1)))

# within each group, check if all v1 is 1.
# The boolean result is coerced to 1 and 0 by ave.  
df$ValidGroup <- ave(v1, df$GroupId, FUN = function(x) all(x == 1))

#   GroupId IndId IndGroupProperty PropertyType ValidGroup
# 1       1     1                1            1          1
# 2       1     1                2            2          1
# 3       1     2                1            1          1
# 4       1     2                2            2          1
# 5       2     3                3            2          0
# 6       2     4                3            2          0
# 7       2     4                4            1          0
# 8       3     5                5            2          0
# 9       3     5                6            2          0

Edit Added dplyr alternative and benchmark for data sets of different size: original data, and data that are 10 and 100 times larger than original.

First wrap up the alternatives in functions:

fun_ave <- function(df){
  v1 <- with(df, ave(PropertyType, list(GroupId, IndId), FUN = function(x) sum(x == 1)))
df$ValidGroup <- ave(v1, list(df$GroupId), FUN = function(x) all(x == 1))
df  
}

library(dplyr)
fun_dp <- function(df){
df %.%
  group_by(GroupId, IndId) %.%
  mutate(
    type1 = any(PropertyType == 1)) %.%
  group_by(GroupId, add = FALSE) %.%
  mutate(
    ValidGroup = all(type1) * 1) %.%
  select(-type1)
}


fun_by <- function(df){
  bar <- by(data=df,INDICES=df$GroupId,FUN=function(xx){
    foo <- table(xx$IndId,xx$PropertyType)
    if ( !("1" %in% colnames(foo)) ) {
      return(FALSE)   # no PropertyType=1 at all in this group
    } else {
      return(all(foo[,"1"]>0))    # return whether all IndId have an 1 entry
    }})
  cbind(df,ValidGroup = as.integer(bar[as.character(df$GroupId)]))
}

Benchmarks

Original data:

microbenchmark(
  fun_ave(df),
  fun_dp(df),
  fun_by(df))

# Unit: microseconds
#        expr      min        lq    median        uq       max neval
# fun_ave(df)  497.964  519.8215  538.8275  563.5355   651.535   100
#  fun_dp(df)  851.861  870.6765  931.1170  968.5590  1760.360   100
#  fun_by(df) 1343.743 1412.5455 1464.6225 1581.8915 12588.607   100

On a tiny data set ave is about twice as fast as dplyr and more than 2.5 times faster than by.

Generate some larger data; 10 times the number of groups and individuals

GroupId <- sample(1:30, 100, replace = TRUE)
IndId <- sample(1:50, 100, replace = TRUE)
PropertyType <- sample(1:2, 100, replace = TRUE)
df2 <- data.frame(GroupId, IndId, PropertyType)

microbenchmark(
  fun_ave(df2),
  fun_dp(df2),
  fun_by(df2))
# Unit: milliseconds
#          expr      min       lq    median        uq       max neval
#  fun_ave(df2) 2.928865 3.185259  3.270978  3.435002  5.151457   100
#   fun_dp(df2) 1.079176 1.231226  1.273610  1.352866  2.717896   100
#   fun_by(df2) 9.464359 9.855317 10.137180 10.484994 12.445680   100

dplyr is three times faster than ave and nearly 10 times faster than by.

100 times the number of groups and individuals

GroupId <- sample(1:300, 1000, replace = TRUE)
IndId <- sample(1:500, 1000, replace = TRUE)
PropertyType <- sample(1:2, 1000, replace = TRUE)
df2 <- data.frame(GroupId, IndId, PropertyType)

microbenchmark(
  fun_ave(df2),
  fun_dp(df2),
  fun_by(df2))

# Unit: milliseconds
# expr        min         lq    median        uq      max neval
# fun_ave(df2) 337.889895 392.983915 413.37554 441.58179 549.5516   100
#  fun_dp(df2)   3.253872   3.477195   3.58173   3.73378  75.8730   100
#  fun_by(df2)  92.248791 102.122733 104.09577 109.99285 186.6829   100

ave is really loosing ground now. dplyr is nearly 30 times faster than by, and more than 100 times faster than ave.

Answer 2

Try this:

bar <- by(data=df,INDICES=df$GroupId,FUN=function(xx){
    foo <- table(xx$IndId,xx$PropertyType)
    if ( !("1" %in% colnames(foo)) ) {
        return(FALSE)   # no PropertyType=1 at all in this group
    } else {
        return(all(foo[,"1"]>0))    # return whether all IndId have an 1 entry
    }})
cbind(df,bar[as.character(df$GroupId)])

The key is using by() to apply a function by a grouping variable, here your df$GroupId. The function to apply is an anonymous function. For each chunk (defined by the grouping variable), it creates a table of the IndId and PropertyType entries. It then looks whether "1" appears at all in the PropertyType - if not, it returns FALSE, if yes, it looks whether every IndId has at least one "1" entry (i.e., whether all entries in the "1" column of the table are >0).

We store the result of the by() call in a structure bar, which is named according to the levels in the grouping variable. This in turn allows us to roll the result back out to the original data.frame. Note how I am using as.character() here to make sure the integers are interpreted as entry names, not entry numbers. Bad Things often happen when things have names that can be interpreted as numbers.

If you really want a 0-1 result instead of TRUE-FALSE, just add an as.numeric().

---

EDIT. Let's turn this into a function.

foobar <- function(object, group, ind, type) {
    bar <- by(data=object,INDICES=object[,group],FUN=function(xx){
        foo <- table(xx[,ind],xx[,type])
        if ( !("1" %in% colnames(foo)) ) {
            return(FALSE)   # no PropertyType=1 at all in this group
        } else {
            return(all(foo[,"1"]>0))    # return whether all IndId have an 1 entry
        }})
    cbind(object,bar[as.character(object[,group])])
}

foobar(df,"GroupId","IndId","PropertyType")

This still requires that the target be exactly "1", but of course this could also be included in the function definition as a parameter. Just be sure to keep column names and variables that contain column names straight.