Question

I’m working with a large dataset x. I want to drop rows of x that are missing in one or more columns in a set of columns of x, that set being specified by a character vector varcols.

So far I’ve tried the following:

require(data.table)
x <- CJ(var1=c(1,0,NA),var2=c(1,0,NA))
x[, textcol := letters[1:nrow(x)]]
varcols <- c("var1","var2")

x[, missing := apply(sapply(.SD,is.na),1,any),.SDcols=varcols]
x <- x[!missing]

Is there a faster way of doing this?
Thanks.

Answer 1

This should be faster than using apply:

x[rowSums(is.na(x[, ..varcols])) == 0, ]
#    var1 var2 textcol
# 1:    0    0       e
# 2:    0    1       f
# 3:    1    0       h
# 4:    1    1       i