r - Select rows with min value by group

Question

I got a problems that bugs me for some time… hopefully anybody here can help me.

I got the following data frame

f <- c('a','a','b','b','b','c','d','d','d','d')
v1 <- c(1.3,10,2,10,10,1.1,10,3.1,10,10)
v2 <- c(1:10)
df <- data.frame(f,v1,v2)

f is a factor; v1 and v2 are values. For each level of f, I want only want to keep one row: the one that has the lowest value of v1 in this factor level.

f   v1  v2
a   1.3 1
b   2   3
c   1.1 6
d   3.1 8

I tried various things with aggregate, ddply, by, tapply… but nothing seems to work. For any suggestions, I would be very thankful.

Answer 1

Using DWin's solution, tapply can be avoided using ave.

df[ df$v1 == ave(df$v1, df$f, FUN=min), ]

This gives another speed-up, as shown below. Mind you, this is also dependent on the number of levels. I give this as I notice that ave is far too often forgotten about, although it is one of the more powerful functions in R.

f <- rep(letters[1:20],10000)
v1 <- rnorm(20*10000)
v2 <- 1:(20*10000)
df <- data.frame(f,v1,v2)

> system.time(df[ df$v1 == ave(df$v1, df$f, FUN=min), ])
   user  system elapsed 
   0.05    0.00    0.05 

> system.time(df[ df$v1 %in% tapply(df$v1, df$f, min), ])
   user  system elapsed 
   0.25    0.03    0.29 

> system.time(lapply(split(df, df$f), FUN = function(x) {
+             vec <- which(x[3] == min(x[3]))
+             return(x[vec, ])
+         })
+  .... [TRUNCATED] 
   user  system elapsed 
   0.56    0.00    0.58 

> system.time(df[tapply(1:nrow(df),df$f,function(i) i[which.min(df$v1[i])]),]
+ )
   user  system elapsed 
   0.17    0.00    0.19 

> system.time( ddply(df, .var = "f", .fun = function(x) {
+     return(subset(x, v1 %in% min(v1)))
+     }
+ )
+ )
   user  system elapsed 
   0.28    0.00    0.28