Question

I am trying to get the cumulative sum of a variable (v) for groups (“a” and “b”) within a dataframe. How can I get the result at the bottom — whose rows are even numbered properly — into column cs of my dataframe?

> library(nlme)
> g <- factor(c("a","b","a","b","a","b","a","b","a","b","a","b"))
> v <- c(1,4,1,4,1,4,2,8,2,8,2,8)
> cs <- rep(0,12)
> d <- data.frame(g,v,cs)

> d
   g v cs
1  a 1 0
2  b 4 0
3  a 1 0
4  b 4 0
5  a 1 0
6  b 4 0
7  a 2 0
8  b 8 0
9  a 2 0
10 b 8 0
11 a 2 0
12 b 8 0

> r=gapply(d,FUN="cumsum",form=~g, which="v")
>r

$a     
   v   
1  1   
3  2   
5  3  
7  5  
9  7  
11 9  

$b    
    v 
2   4 
4   8 
6  12 
8  20 
10 28 
12 36 

> str(r)
List of 2
 $ a:'data.frame':  6 obs. of  1 variable:
  ..$ v: num [1:6] 1 2 3 5 7 9
 $ b:'data.frame':  6 obs. of  1 variable:
  ..$ v: num [1:6] 4 8 12 20 28 36

I guess I could figure out some laborious way to get the data from those dataframes into d$cs, but there’s got to be some easy tweak I’m missing.

Answer 1

I would use ave. If you look at the source of ave, you’ll see it essentially wraps Martin Morgan’s solution.

R> g <- factor(c("a","b","a","b","a","b","a","b","a","b","a","b"))
R> v <- c(1,4,1,4,1,4,2,8,2,8,2,8)
R> d <- data.frame(g,v)
R> d$cs <- ave(v, g, FUN=cumsum)
R> d
   g v cs
1  a 1  1
2  b 4  4
3  a 1  2
4  b 4  8
5  a 1  3
6  b 4 12
7  a 2  5
8  b 8 20
9  a 2  7
10 b 8 28
11 a 2  9
12 b 8 36