R: How to aggregate with NA values - r

Question

To give a small working example, suppose I have the following data frame:
library(dplyr)
country <- rep(c("A", "B", "C"), each = 6)
year <- rep(c(1,2,3), each = 2, times = 3)
categ <- rep(c(0,1), times = 9)
pop <- rep(c(NA, runif(n=8)), each=2)
money <- runif(18)+100
df <- data.frame(Country = country,
Year = year,
Category = categ,
Population = pop,
Money = money)
Now the data I'm actually working with has many more repetitions, namely for every country, year, and category, there are many repeated rows corresponding to various sources of money, and I want to sum these all together. However, for now it's enough just to have one row for each country, year, and category, and just trivially apply the sum() function on each row. This will still exhibit the behavior I'm trying to get rid of.
Notice that for country A in year 1, the population listed is NA. Therefore when I run
aggregate(Money ~ Country+Year+Category+Population, df, sum)
the resulting data frame has dropped the rows corresponding to country A and year 1. I'm only using the ...+Population... bit of code because I want the output data frame to retain this column.
I'm wondering how to make the aggregate() function not drop things that have NAs in the columns by which the grouping occurs--it'd be nice if, for instance, the NAs themselves could be treated as values to group by.
My attempts: I tried turning the Population column into factors but that didn't change the behavior. I read something on the na.action argument but neither na.action=NULL nor na.action=na.skip changed the behavior. I thought about trying to turn all the NAs to 0s, and I can't think of what that would hurt but it feels like a hack that might bite me later on--not sure. But if I try to do it, I'm not sure how I would. When I wrote a function with the is.na() function in it, it didn't apply the if (is.na(x)) test in a vectorized way and gave the error that it would just use the first element of the vector. I thought about perhaps using lapply() on the column and coercing it back to a vector and sticking that in the column, but that also sounds kind of hacky and needlessly round-about.
The solution here seemed to be about keeping the NA values out of the data frame in the first place, which I can't do: Aggregate raster in R with NA values

Answer 1

As you have already mentioned dplyr before your data, you can use dplyr::summarise function. The summarise function supports grouping on NA values.
library(dplyr)
df %>% group_by(Country,Year,Category,Population) %>%
summarise(Money = sum(Money))
# # A tibble: 18 x 5
# # Groups: Country, Year, Category [?]
# Country Year Category Population Money
# <fctr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
# 1 A 1.00 0 NA 101
# 2 A 1.00 1.00 NA 100
# 3 A 2.00 0 0.482 101
# 4 A 2.00 1.00 0.482 101
# 5 A 3.00 0 0.600 101
# 6 A 3.00 1.00 0.600 101
# 7 B 1.00 0 0.494 101
# 8 B 1.00 1.00 0.494 101
# 9 B 2.00 0 0.186 100
# 10 B 2.00 1.00 0.186 100
# 11 B 3.00 0 0.827 101
# 12 B 3.00 1.00 0.827 101
# 13 C 1.00 0 0.668 100
# 14 C 1.00 1.00 0.668 101
# 15 C 2.00 0 0.794 100
# 16 C 2.00 1.00 0.794 100
# 17 C 3.00 0 0.108 100
# 18 C 3.00 1.00 0.108 100
Note: The OP's sample data doesn't have multiple rows for same groups. Hence, number of summarized rows will be same as actual rows.