r - Aggregate by factor levels, keeping other variables in the resulting data frame

Question

I'm trying to calculate the minimum values of a numeric column for each level of a factor, while keeping values of another factor in the resulting data frame.

# dummy data
dat <- data.frame(
    code = c("HH11", "HH45", "JL03", "JL03", "JL03", "HH11"), 
    index = c("023434", "3377477", "3388595", "3377477", "1177777", "023434"), 
    value = c(24.1, 37.2, 78.9, 45.9, 20.0, 34.6)
    )

The result I want is the minimum of value for each level of code, keeping index in the resulting data frame.

# result I want:
#   code value    index
# 1 HH11  24.1   023434
# 2 HH45  37.2  3377477
# 3 JL03  20.0  1177777


# ddply attempt
library(plyr)
ddply(dat, ~ code, summarise, val = min(value))
#   code   val
# 1 HH11  24.1
# 2 HH45  37.2
# 3 JL03  20.0


# base R attempt
aggregate(value ~ code, dat, min)
#   code value
# 1 HH11  24.1
# 2 HH45  37.2
# 3 JL03  20.0

Answer 1

You need to use merge on result of aggregate and original data.frame

merge(aggregate(value ~ code, dat, min), dat, by = c("code", "value"))
##   code value   index
## 1 HH11  24.1  023434
## 2 HH45  37.2 3377477
## 3 JL03  20.0 1177777