Select column name based on data frame content R - r

Question

I want to build a matrix or data frame by choosing names of columns where the element in the data frame contains does not contain an NA. For example, suppose I have:
zz <- data.frame(a = c(1, NA, 3, 5),
b = c(NA, 5, 4, NA),
c = c(5, 6, NA, 8))
which gives:
a b c
1 1 NA 5
2 NA 5 6
3 3 4 NA
4 5 NA 8
I want to recognize each NA and build a new matrix or df that looks like:
a c
b c
a b
a c
There will be the same number of NAs in each row of the input matrix/df. I can't seem to get the right code to do this. Suggestions appreciated!

Answer 1

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
zz %>%
mutate(k = row_number()) %>%
gather(column, value, a, b, c) %>%
filter(!is.na(value)) %>%
group_by(k) %>%
summarise(temp_var = paste(column, collapse = " ")) %>%
separate(temp_var, into = c("var1", "var2"))
# A tibble: 4 × 3
k var1 var2
* <int> <chr> <chr>
1 1 a c
2 2 b c
3 3 a b
4 4 a c

Answer 2

Here's a possible vectorized base R approach
indx <- which(!is.na(zz), arr.ind = TRUE)
matrix(names(zz)[indx[order(indx[, "row"]), "col"]], ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE)
# [,1] [,2]
#[1,] "a" "c"
#[2,] "b" "c"
#[3,] "a" "b"
#[4,] "a" "c"
This finds non-NA indices, sorts by rows order and then subsets the names of your zz data set according to the sorted index. You can wrap it into as.data.frame if you prefer it over a matrix.

Answer 3

EDIT: transpose the data frame one time before process, so don't need to transpose twice in loop in first version.
cols <- names(zz)
for (column in cols) {
zz[[column]] <- ifelse(is.na(zz[[column]]), NA, column)
}
t_zz <- t(zz)
cols <- vector("list", length = ncol(t_zz))
for (i in 1:ncol(t_zz)) {
cols[[i]] <- na.omit(t_zz[, i])
}
new_dt <- as.data.frame(t(do.call("cbind", cols)))
The tricky part here is your goal actually change data frame structure, so the task of "remove NA in each row" have to build row by row as new data frame, since every column in each row could came from different column of original data frame.
zz[1, ] is a one row data frame, use t to convert it into vector so we can use na.omit, then transpose back to row.
I used 2 for loops, but for loops are not necessarily bad in R. The first one is vectorized for each column. The second one need to be done row by row anyway.
EDIT: growing objects is very bad in performance in R. I knew I can use rbindlist from data.table which can take a list of data frames, but OP don't want new packages. My first attempt just use rbind which could not take list as input. Later I found an alternative is to use do.call. It's still slower than rbindlist though.