R - setting equiprobability over a specific variable when sampling - r

Question

I have a data set with more than 2 millions entries which I load into a data frame.
I'm trying to grab a subset of the data. I need around 10000 entries but I need the entries to be picked with equal probability on one variable.
This is what my data looks like with str(data):
'data.frame': 2685628 obs. of 3 variables:
$ category : num 3289 3289 3289 3289 3289 ...
$ id: num 8064180 8990447 747922 9725245 9833082 ...
$ text : chr "text1" "text2" "text3" "text4" ...
You've noticed that I have 3 variables : category,id and text.
I have tried the following :
> sample_data <- data[sample(nrow(data),10000,replace=FALSE),]
Of course this works, but the probability of sample if not equal. Here is the output of count(sample_data$category) :
x freq
1 3289 707
2 3401 341
3 3482 160
4 3502 243
5 3601 1513
6 3783 716
7 4029 423
8 4166 21
9 4178 894
10 4785 31
11 5108 121
12 5245 2178
13 5637 387
14 5946 1484
15 5977 117
16 6139 664
Update: Here is the output of count(data$category) :
x freq
1 3289 198142
2 3401 97864
3 3482 38172
4 3502 59386
5 3601 391800
6 3783 201409
7 4029 111075
8 4166 6749
9 4178 239978
10 4785 6473
11 5108 32083
12 5245 590060
13 5637 98785
14 5946 401625
15 5977 28769
16 6139 183258
But when I try setting the probability I get the following error :
> catCount <- length(unique(data$category))
> probabilities <- rep(c(1/catCount),catCount)
> train_set <- data[sample(nrow(data),10000,prob=probabilities),]
Error in sample.int(x, size, replace, prob) :
incorrect number of probabilities
I understand that the sample function is randomly picking between the row number but I can't figure out how to associate that with the probability over the categories.
Question : How can I sample my data over an equal probability for the category variable?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I guess you could do this with some simple base R operation, though you should remember that you are using probabilities here within sample, thus getting the exact amount per each combination won't work using this method, though you can get close enough for large enough sample.
Here's an example data
set.seed(123)
data <- data.frame(category = sample(rep(letters[1:10], seq(1000, 10000, by = 1000)), 55000))
Then
probs <- 1/prop.table(table(data$category)) # Calculating relative probabilities
data$probs <- probs[match(data$category, names(probs))] # Matching them to the correct rows
set.seed(123)
train_set <- data[sample(nrow(data), 1000, prob = data$probs), ] # Sampling
table(train_set$category) # Checking frequencies
# a b c d e f g h i j
# 94 103 96 107 105 99 100 96 107 93
Edit: So here's a possible data.table equivalent
library(data.table)
setDT(data)[, probs := .N, category][, probs := .N/probs]
train_set <- data[sample(.N, 1000, prob = probs)]
Edit #2: Here's a very nice solution using the dplyr package contributed by #Khashaa and #docendodiscimus
The nice thing about this solution is that it returns the exact sample size within each group
library(dplyr)
train_set <- data %>%
group_by(category) %>%
sample_n(1000)
Edit #3:
It seems that data.table equivalent to dplyr::sample_n would be
library(data.table)
train_set <- setDT(data)[data[, sample(.I, 1000), category]$V1]
Which will also return the exact sample size within each group