How can I nest my data frame based on identical values in a column?

Question

I have a data frame with some identical names in it, and wish to get some basic stats on some associated numbers. Originally, the data look like this:

name res1 res2 res3
foo   1.1   NA   10
foo   2.4   NA  2.1
foo   NA     1  1.2
bar     1    2    3

In order to get stats, I was thinking of nesting the data like this:

name       res1  res2           res3
foo   [1.1,2.4]   [1]   [10,2.1,1.2]
bar         [1]   [2]            [3]

This would be a step doing things like getting the mean and S.D, etc. of each vector. i.e. I would then add columns for the mean of res1, the SD of res1, etc. How can I nest my data frame based on identical values in a column?

Answer 1

While I agree with thelatemail's suggestion, you can get the desired output with dplyr:

library(dplyr)
dtf %>% group_by(name) %>% summarize_all( ~ list(.[!is.na(.)]))

# # A tibble: 2 x 4
#     name      res1      res2      res3
#   <fctr>    <list>    <list>    <list>
# 1    bar <dbl [1]> <int [1]> <dbl [1]>
# 2    foo <dbl [2]> <int [1]> <dbl [3]>

the data:

dtf <- read.table(textConnection('name res1 res2 res3
foo   1.1   NA   10
foo   2.4   NA  2.1
foo   NA     1  1.2
bar     1    2    3'), header = TRUE)