Question

I am having trouble figuring out the most elegant and flexible way to switch data from long format to wide format when I have more than one measure variable I want to bring along.

For example, here’s a simple data frame in long format. ID is the subject, TIME is a time variable, and X and Y are measurements made of ID at TIME:

> my.df <- data.frame(ID=rep(c("A","B","C"), 5), TIME=rep(1:5, each=3), X=1:15, Y=16:30)
> my.df

   ID TIME  X  Y
1   A    1  1 16
2   B    1  2 17
3   C    1  3 18
4   A    2  4 19
5   B    2  5 20
6   C    2  6 21
7   A    3  7 22
8   B    3  8 23
9   C    3  9 24
10  A    4 10 25
11  B    4 11 26
12  C    4 12 27
13  A    5 13 28
14  B    5 14 29
15  C    5 15 30

If I just wanted to turn the values of TIME into column headers containing the include X, I know I can use cast() from the reshape package (or dcast() from reshape2):

> cast(my.df, ID ~ TIME, value="X")
  ID 1 2 3  4  5
1  A 1 4 7 10 13
2  B 2 5 8 11 14
3  C 3 6 9 12 15

But what I really want to do is also bring along Y as another measure variable, and have the column names reflect both the measure variable name and the time value:

  ID X_1 X_2 X_3  X_4 X_5 Y_1 Y_2 Y_3 Y_4 Y_5
1  A   1   4   7   10  13  16  19  22  25  28
2  B   2   5   8   11  14  17  20  23  26  29
3  C   3   6   9   12  15  18  21  24  27  30

(FWIW, I don’t really care if all the X‘s are first followed by the Y‘s, or if they are interleaved as X_1, Y_1, X_2, Y_2, etc.)

I can get close to this by cast-ing the long data twice and merging the results, though the column names need some work, and I would need to tweak it if I needed to add a 3rd or 4th variable in addition to X and Y:

merge(
cast(my.df, ID ~ TIME, value="X"),
cast(my.df, ID ~ TIME, value="Y"),
by="ID", suffixes=c("_X","_Y")
)

Seems like some combination of functions in reshape2 and/or plyr should be able to do this more elegantly that my attempt, as well as handling multiple measure variables more cleanly. Something like cast(my.df, ID ~ TIME, value=c("X","Y")), which isn’t valid. But I haven’t been able to figure it out.

Answer 1

In order to handle multiple variables like you want, you need to melt the data you have before casting it.

library("reshape2")

dcast(melt(my.df, id.vars=c("ID", "TIME")), ID~variable+TIME)

which gives

  ID X_1 X_2 X_3 X_4 X_5 Y_1 Y_2 Y_3 Y_4 Y_5
1  A   1   4   7  10  13  16  19  22  25  28
2  B   2   5   8  11  14  17  20  23  26  29
3  C   3   6   9  12  15  18  21  24  27  30

---

EDIT based on comment:

The data frame

num.id = 10 
num.time=10 
my.df <- data.frame(ID=rep(LETTERS[1:num.id], num.time), 
                    TIME=rep(1:num.time, each=num.id), 
                    X=1:(num.id*num.time), 
                    Y=(num.id*num.time)+1:(2*length(1:(num.id*num.time))))

gives a different result (all entries are 2) because the ID/TIME combination does not indicate a unique row. In fact, there are two rows with each ID/TIME combinations. reshape2 assumes a single value for each possible combination of the variables and will apply a summary function to create a single variable is there are multiple entries. That is why there is the warning

Aggregation function missing: defaulting to length

You can get something that works if you add another variable which breaks that redundancy.

my.df$cycle <- rep(1:2, each=num.id*num.time)
dcast(melt(my.df, id.vars=c("cycle", "ID", "TIME")), cycle+ID~variable+TIME)

This works because cycle/ID/time now uniquely defines a row in my.df.