How to squeeze in missing values into a vector - r

Question

Let me try to make this question as general as possible.
Let's say I have two variables a and b.
a <- as.integer(runif(20, min = 0, max = 10))
a <- as.data.frame(a)
b <- as.data.frame(a[c(-7, -11, -15),])
So b has 17 observations and is a subset of a which has 20 observations.
My question is the following: how I would use these two variables to generate a third variable c which like a has 20 observations but for which observations 7, 11 and 15 are missing, and for which the other observations are identical to b but in the order of a?
Or to put it somewhat differently: how could I squeeze in these missing observations into variable b at locations 7, 11 and 15?
It seems pretty straightforward (and it probably is) but I have been not getting this to work for a bit too long now.

Answer 1

1) loop Try this loop:
# test data
set.seed(123) # for reproducibility
a <- as.integer(runif(20, min = 0, max = 10))
a <- as.data.frame(a)
b <- as.data.frame(a[c(-7, -11, -15),])
# lets work with vectors
A <- a[[1]]
B <- b[[1]]
j <- 1
C <- A
for(i in seq_along(A)) if (A[i] == B[j]) j <- j+1 else C[i] <- NA
which gives:
> C
[1] 2 7 4 8 9 0 NA 8 5 4 NA 4 6 5 NA 8 2 0 3 9
2) Reduce Here is a loop-free version:
f <- function(j, a) j + (a == B[j])
r <- Reduce(f, A, acc = TRUE)
ifelse(duplicated(r), NA, A)
giving:
[1] 2 7 4 8 9 0 NA 8 5 4 NA 4 6 5 NA 8 2 0 3 9
3) dtw. Using dtw in the package of the same name we can get a compact loop-free one-liner:
library(dtw)
ifelse(duplicated(dtw(A, B)$index2), NA, A)
giving:
[1] 2 7 4 8 9 0 NA 8 5 4 NA 4 6 5 NA 8 2 0 3 9
REVISED Added additional solutions.

Answer 2

Here's a more complicated way of doing it, using the Levenshtein distance algorithm, that does a better job on more complicated examples (it also seemed faster in a couple of larger tests I tried):
# using same data as G. Grothendieck:
set.seed(123) # for reproducibility
a <- as.integer(runif(20, min = 0, max = 10))
a <- as.data.frame(a)
b <- as.data.frame(a[c(-7, -11, -15),])
A = a[[1]]
B = b[[1]]
# compute the transformation between the two, assigning infinite weight to
# insertion and substitution
# using +1 here because the integers fed to intToUtf8 have to be larger than 0
# could also adjust the range more dynamically based on A and B
transf = attr(adist(intToUtf8(A+1), intToUtf8(B+1),
costs = c(Inf,1,Inf), counts = TRUE), 'trafos')
C = A
C[substring(transf, 1:nchar(transf), 1:nchar(transf)) == "D"] <- NA
#[1] 2 7 4 8 9 0 NA 8 5 4 NA 4 6 5 NA 8 2 0 3 9
More complex matching example (where the greedy algorithm would perform poorly):
A = c(1,1,2,2,1,1,1,2,2,2)
B = c(1,1,1,2,2,2)
transf = attr(adist(intToUtf8(A), intToUtf8(B),
costs = c(Inf,1,Inf), counts = TRUE), 'trafos')
C = A
C[substring(transf, 1:nchar(transf), 1:nchar(transf)) == "D"] <- NA
#[1] NA NA NA NA 1 1 1 2 2 2
# the greedy algorithm would return this instead:
#[1] 1 1 NA NA 1 NA NA 2 2 2

Answer 3

The data frame version, which isn't terribly different from G.'s above.
(Assumes a,b setup as above).
j <- 1
c <- a
for (i in (seq_along(a[,1]))) {
if (a[i,1]==b[j,1]) {
j <- j+1
} else
{
c[i,1] <- NA
}
}