Sample random rows in dataframe

nikhil picture nikhil · Nov 25, 2011 · Viewed 453.7k times · Source

I am struggling to find the appropriate function that would return a specified number of rows picked up randomly without replacement from a data frame in R language? Can anyone help me out?

Answer

John Colby picture John Colby · Nov 25, 2011

First make some data:

> df = data.frame(matrix(rnorm(20), nrow=10))
> df
           X1         X2
1   0.7091409 -1.4061361
2  -1.1334614 -0.1973846
3   2.3343391 -0.4385071
4  -0.9040278 -0.6593677
5   0.4180331 -1.2592415
6   0.7572246 -0.5463655
7  -0.8996483  0.4231117
8  -1.0356774 -0.1640883
9  -0.3983045  0.7157506
10 -0.9060305  2.3234110

Then select some rows at random:

> df[sample(nrow(df), 3), ]
           X1         X2
9  -0.3983045  0.7157506
2  -1.1334614 -0.1973846
10 -0.9060305  2.3234110