R: Ordering rows in a data frame by multiple columns
In one of the assignments of Computing for Data Analysis we needed to sort a data frame based on the values in two of the columns and then return the top value.
The initial data frame looked a bit like this:
> names <- c("paul", "mark", "dave", "will", "john")
> values <- c(1,4,1,2,1)
> smallData <- data.frame(name = names, value = values)
> smallData
name value
1 paul 1
2 mark 4
3 dave 1
4 will 2
5 john 1I want to be able to sort the data frame by value and name both in ascending order so the final result should look like this:
name value
3 dave 1
5 john 1
1 paul 1
4 will 2
2 mark 4To do that we can use the http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/order.html function which will tell us the indices of the vector in sorted order.
e.g. in our case
> order(c(1,4,1,2,1))
[1] 1 3 5 4 2If we pass a collection of indices to the extract operation it’ll reorder the rows. e.g.
> smallData[c(5,4,3,2,1),]
name value
5 john 1
4 will 2
3 dave 1
2 mark 4
1 paul 1In our case we wire everything together like this to sort by the second column (value):
> smallData[order(smallData[,2]),]
name value
1 paul 1
3 dave 1
5 john 1
4 will 2
2 mark 4It’s a reasonably small tweak to get it to sort first by the second column and then by the first (name) which is what we want:
> smallData[order(smallData[,2], smallData[,1]),]
name value
3 dave 1
5 john 1
1 paul 1
4 will 2
2 mark 4If we wanted to use the column names instead of indices we’d do the following:
> smallData[order(smallData$value, smallData$name),]
name value
3 dave 1
5 john 1
1 paul 1
4 will 2
2 mark 4We could also rewrite it using the with function if we want to reduce the code further:
> smallData[with(smallData, order(value, name)),]
name value
3 dave 1
5 john 1
1 paul 1
4 will 2
2 mark 4As I understand it, when we use with we put smallData into the environment and evaluate the second argument to with with respect to that so in this case it allows us to refer to the column names of smallData.
About the author
I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.