dplyr: passing a grouped tibble to a custom function - r

Question

(The following scenario simplifies my actual situation)
My data comes from villages, and I would like to summarize an outcome variable by a village variable.
> data
village A Z Y
<chr> <int> <int> <dbl>
1 a 1 1 500
2 a 1 1 400
3 a 1 0 800
4 b 1 0 300
5 b 1 1 700
For example, I would like to calculate the mean of Y only using Z==z by villages. In this case, I want to have (500 + 400)/2 = 450 for village "a" and 700 for village "b".
Please note that the actual situation is more complicated and I cannot directly use this answer, but the point is I need to pass a grouped tibble and a global variable (z) to my function.
z <- 1 # z takes 0 or 1
data %>%
group_by(village) %>% # grouping by village
summarize(Y_village = Y_hat_village(., z)) # pass a part of tibble and a global variable
Y_hat_village <- function(data_village, z){
# This function takes a part of tibble (`data_village`) and a variable `z`
# Calculate the mean for a specific z in a village
data_z <- data_village %>% filter(Z==get("z"))
return(mean(data_z$Y))
}
However, I found . passes entire tibble and the code above returns the same values for all groups.

Answer 1

There are a couple things you can simplify. One is in your function: since you're passing in a value z to the function, you don't need to use get("z"). You have a z in the global environment that you pass in; or, more safely, assign your z value to a variable with some other name so you don't run into scoping issues, and pass that in to the function. In this case, I'm calling it z_val.
library(tidyverse)
z_val <- 1
Y_hat_village2 <- function(data, z) {
data_z <- data %>% filter(Z == z)
return(mean(data_z$Y))
}
You can make the function call on each group using do, which will get you a list-column, and then unnesting that column. Again note that I'm passing in the variable z_val to the argument z.
df %>%
group_by(village) %>%
do(y_hat = Y_hat_village2(., z = z_val)) %>%
unnest()
#> # A tibble: 2 x 2
#> village y_hat
#> <chr> <dbl>
#> 1 a 450
#> 2 b 700
However, do is being deprecated in favor of purrr::map, which I am still having trouble getting the hang of. In this case, you can group and nest, which gives a column of data frames called data, then map over that column and again supply z = z_val. When you unnest the y_hat column, you still have the original data as a nested column, since you wanted access to the rest of the columns still.
df %>%
group_by(village) %>%
nest() %>%
mutate(y_hat = map(data, ~Y_hat_village2(., z = z_val))) %>%
unnest(y_hat)
#> # A tibble: 2 x 3
#> village data y_hat
#> <chr> <list> <dbl>
#> 1 a <tibble [3 × 3]> 450
#> 2 b <tibble [2 × 3]> 700
Just to check that everything works okay, I also passed in z = 0 to check for 1. scoping issues, and 2. that other values of z work.
df %>%
group_by(village) %>%
nest() %>%
mutate(y_hat = map(data, ~Y_hat_village2(., z = 0))) %>%
unnest(y_hat)
#> # A tibble: 2 x 3
#> village data y_hat
#> <chr> <list> <dbl>
#> 1 a <tibble [3 × 3]> 800
#> 2 b <tibble [2 × 3]> 300

Answer 2

As an extension/modification to #patL's answer, you can also wrap the tidyverse solution within purrr:map to return a list of two tibbles, one for each z value:
z <- c(0, 1);
map(z, ~df %>% filter(Z == .x) %>% group_by(village) %>% summarise(Y.mean = mean(Y)))
#[[1]]
## A tibble: 2 x 2
# village Y.mean
# <fct> <dbl>
#1 a 800.
#2 b 300.
#
#[[2]]
## A tibble: 2 x 2
# village Y.mean
# <fct> <dbl>
#1 a 450.
#2 b 700.
Sample data
df <- read.table(text =
" village A Z Y
1 a 1 1 500
2 a 1 1 400
3 a 1 0 800
4 b 1 0 300
5 b 1 1 700 ", header = T)

Answer 3

You can use dplyr to accomplish it:
library(dplyr)
df %>%
group_by(village) %>%
filter(Z == 1) %>%
summarise(Y_village = mean(Y))
## A tibble: 2 x 2
# village Y_village
# <chr> <dbl>
#1 a 450
#2 b 700
To get all columns:
df %>%
group_by(village) %>%
filter(Z == 1) %>%
mutate(Y_village = mean(Y)) %>%
distinct(village, A, Z, Y_village)
## A tibble: 2 x 4
## Groups: village [2]
# village A Z Y_village
# <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#1 a 1 1 450
#2 b 1 1 700
data
df <- data_frame(village = c("a", "a", "a", "b", "b"),
A = rep(1, 5),
Z = c(1, 1, 0, 0, 1),
Y = c(500, 400, 800, 30, 700))