How to sum a variable by group

Question

I have a data frame with two columns. First column contains categories such as "First", "Second", "Third", and the second column has numbers that represent the number of times I saw the specific groups from "Category".

For example:

Category     Frequency
First        10
First        15
First        5
Second       2
Third        14
Third        20
Second       3

I want to sort the data by Category and sum all the Frequencies:

Category     Frequency
First        30
Second       5
Third        34

How would I do this in R?

Answer 1

Using aggregate:

aggregate(x$Frequency, by=list(Category=x$Category), FUN=sum)
  Category  x
1    First 30
2   Second  5
3    Third 34

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In the example above, multiple dimensions can be specified in the list. Multiple aggregated metrics of the same data type can be incorporated via cbind:

aggregate(cbind(x$Frequency, x$Metric2, x$Metric3) ...

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(embedding @thelatemail comment), aggregate has a formula interface too

aggregate(Frequency ~ Category, x, sum)

Or if you want to aggregate multiple columns, you could use the . notation (works for one column too)

aggregate(. ~ Category, x, sum)

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or tapply:

tapply(x$Frequency, x$Category, FUN=sum)
 First Second  Third 
    30      5     34 

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Using this data:

x <- data.frame(Category=factor(c("First", "First", "First", "Second",
                                      "Third", "Third", "Second")), 
                    Frequency=c(10,15,5,2,14,20,3))