Question

I would like to use R to create a new column in my dataset that includes a maximum for each unique group. My data look like this:

group<-c("A","A","A","A","A","B","B","C","C","C")
replicate<-c(1,2,3,4,5,1,2,1,2,3)
x<-data.frame(cbind(group,replicate))

I’d like to create the third column as shown below – the maximum for each group.

group   replicate max.per.group
A       1         5       
A       2         5
A       3         5
A       4         5
A       5         5
B       1         2
B       2         2
C       1         3
C       2         3
C       3         3

Answer 1

Try

# This is how you create your data.frame
group<-c("A","A","A","A","A","B","B","C","C","C")
replicate<-c(1,2,3,4,5,1,2,1,2,3)
x<-data.frame(group,replicate) # here you don't need c()

# Here's my solution    
Max <- tapply(x$replicate, x$group,max)
data.frame(x, max.per.group=rep(Max, table(x$group)))
 group replicate max.per.group
1      A         1             5
2      A         2             5
3      A         3             5
4      A         4             5
5      A         5             5
6      B         1             2
7      B         2             2
8      C         1             3
9      C         2             3
10     C         3             3