Apologies if this is a repeat question but I could not find the specific answer I am looking for. I have a dataframe with counts of different species caught on a given trip. A simplified example with 5 trips and 4 species is below:
trip = c(1,1,1,2,2,3,3,3,3,4,5,5)
species = c("a","b","c","b","d","a","b","c","d","c","c","d")
count = c(5,7,3,1,8,10,1,4,3,1,2,10)
dat = cbind.data.frame(trip, species, count)
dat
> dat
trip species count
1 1 a 5
2 1 b 7
3 1 c 3
4 2 b 1
5 2 d 8
6 3 a 10
7 3 b 1
8 3 c 4
9 3 d 3
10 4 c 1
11 5 c 2
12 5 d 10
I am only interested in the counts of species b for each trip. So I want to manipulate this data frame so I end up with one that looks like this:
trip2 = c(1,2,3,4,5)
species2 = c("b","b","b","b","b")
count2 = c(7,1,1,0,0)
dat2 = cbind.data.frame(trip2, species2, count2)
dat2
> dat2
trip2 species2 count2
1 1 b 7
2 2 b 1
3 3 b 1
4 4 b 0
5 5 b 0
I want to keep all trips, including trips where species b was not observed. So I can't just subset the data by species b. I know I can cast the data so species are the columns and then just remove the columns for the other species like so:
library(dplyr)
library(reshape2)
test = dcast(dat, trip ~ species, value.var = "count", fun.aggregate = sum)
test
> test
trip a b c d
1 1 5 7 3 0
2 2 0 1 0 8
3 3 10 1 4 3
4 4 0 0 1 0
5 5 0 0 2 10
However, my real dataset has several hundred species caught on thousands of trips, and if I try to cast that many species to columns R chokes. There are way too many columns. Is there a way to specify in dcast that I only want to cast species b? Or is there another way to do this that doesn't require casting the data? Thank you.
Here is a data.table approach which I suspect will be very fast for you:
library(data.table)
setDT(dat)
result <- dat[,.(species = "b", count = sum(.SD[species == "b",count])),by = trip]
result
trip species count
1: 1 b 7
2: 2 b 1
3: 3 b 1
4: 4 b 0
5: 5 b 0