Prevent dropping from non-occuring levels using dplyr

1 Load packages

library(tidyverse)  # data wrangling

2 Problem

Consider the following situation:

mtcars |> 
  group_by(high_hp = hp > 1000) |> 
  count(high_hp)
#> # A tibble: 1 × 2
#> # Groups:   high_hp [1]
#>   high_hp     n
#>   <lgl>   <int>
#> 1 FALSE      32

The summary table does not show the level TRUE, as it is not occuring in the data. This can be problematic: If the data is unknown before summarizing and you would expect that both/all levels (TRUE, FALSE) occur. Just imagine that a subsequent function will count the level TRUE and the level FALSE. If one level is missing, your system may brake down.

3 Solution

Using dplyr and count or summarize, one solution is to turn the grouping variable in a factor, and then using the parameter .drop = FALSE in count or summarise.

Here’s an example for count:

mtcars |> 
  group_by(high_hp = hp > 1000) |> 
  mutate(high_hp = factor(high_hp, levels = c(FALSE, TRUE))) |> 
  count(high_hp, .drop = FALSE)
#> # A tibble: 2 × 2
#> # Groups:   high_hp [2]
#>   high_hp     n
#>   <fct>   <int>
#> 1 FALSE      32
#> 2 TRUE        0

And here a similar one for summarise:

mtcars %>% 
  group_by(hp_over_1000 = factor(hp > 1000, levels = c(FALSE, TRUE)), .drop = FALSE) %>% 
  summarise(mean_hp = mean(hp))
#> # A tibble: 2 × 2
#>   hp_over_1000 mean_hp
#>   <fct>          <dbl>
#> 1 FALSE           147.
#> 2 TRUE            NaN

If we would like to make sure that the resulting variable is not NaN, then we could use complete:

mtcars %>% 
  group_by(hp_over_1000 = factor(hp > 1000, levels = c(FALSE, TRUE)), .drop = FALSE) %>% 
  summarise(mean_hp = mean(hp)) %>%
  complete(hp_over_1000, fill = list(mean_hp = NA))
#> # A tibble: 2 × 2
#>   hp_over_1000 mean_hp
#>   <fct>          <dbl>
#> 1 FALSE           147.
#> 2 TRUE             NA

4 Reproducibility

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