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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T18:23:45+00:00

While experimenting with aggregate for another question here , I encountered a rather strange

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While experimenting with aggregate for another question here, I encountered a rather strange result. I’m unable to figure out why and am wondering if what I’m doing is totally wrong.

Suppose, I have a data.frame like this:

df <- structure(list(V1 = c(1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 3L, 1L), 
                     V2 = c(2L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 2L), 
                     V3 = c(3L, 4L, 3L, 4L, 5L, 3L), 
                     V4 = c(4L, 5L, 4L, 5L, 6L, 4L)), 
                  .Names = c("V1", "V2", "V3", "V4"), 
        row.names = c(NA, -6L), class = "data.frame")
> df
#   V1 V2 V3 V4
# 1  1  2  3  4
# 2  2  3  4  5
# 3  1  2  3  4
# 4  2  3  4  5
# 5  3  4  5  6
# 6  1  2  3  4

Now, if I want to output a data.frame with unique rows with an additional column indicating their frequency in df. For this example,

#   V1 V2 V3 V4 x
# 1  1  2  3  4 3
# 2  2  3  4  5 2
# 3  3  4  5  6 1

I obtained this output using aggregate by experimenting as follows:

> aggregate(do.call(paste, df), by=df, print)

# [1] "1 2 3 4" "1 2 3 4" "1 2 3 4"
# [1] "2 3 4 5" "2 3 4 5"
# [1] "3 4 5 6"
#   V1 V2 V3 V4                         x
# 1  1  2  3  4 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4
# 2  2  3  4  5          2 3 4 5, 2 3 4 5
# 3  3  4  5  6                   3 4 5 6

So, this gave me the pasted string. So, if I were to use length instead of print, it should give me the number of such occurrences, which is the desired result, which was the case (as shown below).

> aggregate(do.call(paste, df), by=df, length)
#   V1 V2 V3 V4 x
# 1  1  2  3  4 3
# 2  2  3  4  5 2
# 3  3  4  5  6 1

And this seemed to work. However, when the data.frame dimensions are 4*2500, the output data.frame is 1*2501 instead of 4*2501 (all rows are unique, so the frequency is 1).

> df <- as.data.frame(matrix(sample(1:3, 1e4, replace = TRUE), nrow=4))
> o <- aggregate(do.call(paste, df), by=df, length)
> dim(o)
# [1]    1 2501

I tested with smaller data.frames with just unique rows and it gives the right output (change nrow=40, for example). However, when the dimensions of the matrix increase, this doesn’t seem to work. And I just can’t figure out what’s going wrong! Any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The issue here is how aggregate.data.frame() determines the groups.

    In aggregate.data.frame() there is a loop which forms the grouping variable grp. In that loop, grp is altered/updated via:

    grp <- grp * nlevels(ind) + (as.integer(ind) - 1L)

    The problem with your example if that once by is converted to factors, and the loop has gone over all of these factors, in your example grp ends up being:

    Browse[2]> grp
[1] Inf Inf Inf Inf

    Essentially the looping update pushed the values of grp to a number indistinguishable from Inf.

    Having done that, aggregate.data.frame() later does this

    y <- y[match(sort(unique(grp)), grp, 0L), , drop = FALSE]

    and this is where the earlier problem now manifests itself as

    dim(y[match(sort(unique(grp)), grp, 0L), , drop = FALSE])

    because

    match(sort(unique(grp)), grp, 0L)

    clearly returns just 1:

    > match(sort(unique(grp)), grp, 0L)
[1] 1

    as there is only one unique value of grp.

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