dplyr 0.2
I’m very excited to announce dplyr 0.2. It has three big features:
-
improved piping courtesy of the magrittr package
-
a vastly more useful implementation of
do() -
five new verbs:
sample_n(),sample_frac(),summarise_each(),mutate_eachandglimpse().
These features are described in more detail below. To learn more about the 35 new minor improvements and bug fixes, please read the full release notes.
Improved piping
dplyr now imports %>% from the magrittr package by Stefan Milton Bache. I recommend that you use this instead of %.% because it is easier to type (since you can hold down the shift key) and is more flexible. With you %>%, you can control which argument on the RHS receives the LHS with the pronoun .. This makes %>% more useful with base R functions because they don’t always take the data frame as the first argument. For example you could pipe mtcars to xtabs() with:
mtcars %>% xtabs( ~ cyl + vs, data = .)
dplyr only exports %>% from magrittr, but magrittr contains many other useful functions. To use them, load magrittr explicitly with library(magrittr). For more details, see vignette("magrittr").
%.% will be deprecated in a future version of dplyr, but it won’t happen for a while. I’ve deprecated chain() to encourage a single style of dplyr usage: please use %>% instead.
Do
do() has been completely overhauled, and group_by() + do() is now equivalent in power to plyr::dlply(). There are two ways to use do(), either with multiple named arguments or a single unnamed arguments. If you use named arguments, each argument becomes a list-variable in the output. A list-variable can contain any arbitrary R object which makes this form of do() useful for storing models:
library(dplyr)
models %>% group_by(cyl) %>% do(model = lm(mpg ~ wt, data = .))
models %>% summarise(rsq = summary(model)$r.squared)
If you use an unnamed argument, the result should be a data frame. This allows you to apply arbitrary functions to each group.
mtcars %>% group_by(cyl) %>% do(head(., 1))
Note the use of the pronoun . to refer to the data in the current group.
do() also has an automatic progress bar. It appears if the computation takes longer than 2 seconds and estimates how long the job will take to complete.
New verbs
sample_n() randomly samples a fixed number of rows from a tbl; sample_frac() randomly samples a fixed fraction of rows. They currently only work for local data frames and data tables.
summarise_each() and mutate_each() make it easy to apply one or more functions to multiple columns in a tbl. These works for all srcs that summarise() and mutate() work for.
glimpse() makes it possible to see all the columns in a tbl, displaying as much data for each variable as can be fit on a single line.
