dummy variable columns based on strings from other columns

Question

I have a database with patient id number and the treatment they recived. I would like to have a dummy column for every different INDIVIDUAL treatment (ie, as in did the patient recieve treatment A,B,C,D).

This is way simplified because I have over 20 treatments and thousands of patients, and I can't figure out a simple way to do so.

example <- data.frame(id_number = c(0, 1, 2, 3, 4), 
                      treatment = c("A", "A+B+C+D", "C+B", "B+A", "C"))

I would like to have something like this:

desired_result <- data.frame(id_number = c(0, 1, 2, 3, 4), 
                             treatment = c("A", "A+B+C+D", "C+B", "B+A","C"),
                             A=c(1,1,0,1,0), 
                             B=c(0,1,1,1,0),
                             C=c(0,1,1,0,1),
                             D=c(0,1,0,0,0))

Answer 1

One tidyverse possibility could be:

example %>%
 mutate(treatment2 = strsplit(treatment, "+", fixed = TRUE)) %>%
 unnest() %>%
 spread(treatment2, treatment2) %>%
 mutate_at(vars(-id_number, -treatment), ~ (!is.na(.)) * 1)

  id_number treatment A B C D
1         0         A 1 0 0 0
2         1   A+B+C+D 1 1 1 1
3         2       C+B 0 1 1 0
4         3       B+A 1 1 0 0
5         4         C 0 0 1 0

Or:

example %>%
 mutate(treatment2 = strsplit(treatment, "+", fixed = TRUE)) %>%
 unnest() %>%
 mutate(val = 1) %>%
 spread(treatment2, val, fill = 0)