Extract the best attributes from a data.table - r

Question

I have a data.table:
> (a <- data.table(id=c(1,1,1,2,2,3),
attribute=c("a","b","c","a","b","c"),
importance=1:6,
key=c("id","importance")))
id attribute importance
1: 1 a 1
2: 1 b 2
3: 1 c 3
4: 2 a 4
5: 2 b 5
6: 3 c 6
I want:
--1-- sort it by the second key in the decreasing order (i.e., the most important attributes should come first)
--2-- select the top 2 (or 10) attributes for each id, i.e.:
id attribute importance
3: 1 c 3
2: 1 b 2
5: 2 b 5
4: 2 a 4
6: 3 c 6
--3-- pivot the above:
id attribute.1 importance.1 attribute.2 importance.2
1 c 3 b 2
2 b 5 a 4
3 c 6 NA NA
It appears that the last operation can be done with something like:
a[,{
tmp <- .SD[.N:1];
list(a1 = tmp$attribute[1],
i1 = tmp$importance[1])
}, by=id]
Is this The Right Way?
How do I do the first two tasks?

Answer 1

I'd do the first two tasks like this:
a[a[, .I[.N:(.N-1)], by=list(id)]$V1]
The inner a[, .I[.N:(.N-1)], ,by=list(id)] gives you the indices in the order you require for every unique group in id. Then you subset a with the V1 column (which has the indices in the order you require).
You'll have to take care of negative indices here, maybe something like:
a[a[, .I[seq.int(.N, max(.N-1L, 1L))], by=list(id)]$V1]