I am trying to assign the vector output (i.e. greater than length 1) of a function to multiple columns in a single operation (or at least as concisely as possible).
Take the range()
function for example which returns as output a numeric vector of length 2 denoting the minimum and maximum, respectively. Let's say I want to compute the range()
per group and assign the output to two columns min
and max
.
My current approach is combining summarize
followed by manually adding a key and then re-shaping to wide format:
library(magrittr)
# create data
df <- dplyr::tibble(group = rep(letters[1:3], each = 3),
x = rpois(9, 10))
df
#> # A tibble: 9 x 2
#> group x
#> <chr> <int>
#> 1 a 8
#> 2 a 12
#> 3 a 8
#> 4 b 9
#> 5 b 14
#> 6 b 9
#> 7 c 11
#> 8 c 6
#> 9 c 12
# summarize gives two lines per group
range_df <- df %>%
dplyr::group_by(group) %>%
dplyr::summarize(range = range(x)) %>%
dplyr::ungroup()
range_df
#> # A tibble: 6 x 2
#> group range
#> <chr> <int>
#> 1 a 8
#> 2 a 12
#> 3 b 9
#> 4 b 14
#> 5 c 6
#> 6 c 12
# add key and reshape
range_df %>%
dplyr::mutate(key = rep(c("min", "max"), 3)) %>%
tidyr::pivot_wider(names_from = key, values_from = range)
#> # A tibble: 3 x 3
#> group min max
#> <chr> <int> <int>
#> 1 a 8 12
#> 2 b 9 14
#> 3 c 6 12
Is there a more elegant / concise alternative to this?
Edit:
Ideally the alternative solution could handle an arbitrary number of outputs (e.g. if the function returns an output with length 3 then 3 variables should be created).
Based on onyambu's answer, I build a small generic function for this. There probably will be some edge cases, where this will not work.
out2col <- function(x, fun, out_names = c(), add_args = list()) {
tmp <- do.call(what = fun, args = c(list(x), add_args))
out <- data.frame(t(tmp))
if (length(out_names) != 0) {
if (length(tmp) != length(out_names)) {
stop("provided names did not match the number of outputs")
}
out <- setNames(object = out, nm = out_names)
}
return(out)
}
Examples without any additional parameters:
df %>%
summarise(across(x, out2col, .unpack = TRUE, fun = range),
.by=group)
Output:
# A tibble: 3 × 3
group x_X1 x_X2
<chr> <int> <int>
1 a 7 10
2 b 11 14
3 c 9 14
Examples with additional parameters:
df %>%
summarise(across(x, out2col, .unpack = TRUE, fun = quantile,
out_names = c("min", "max", "Q25"),
add_args = list(probs = c(0, 1, 0.25))
),
.by=group)
Output:
# A tibble: 3 × 4
group x_min x_max x_Q25
<chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 a 7 10 7.5
2 b 11 14 11.5
3 c 9 14 10