The Split-Apply-Combine Strategy

Many data analysis tasks involve splitting a data set into groups, applying some functions to each of the groups and then combining the results. A standardized framework for handling this sort of computation is described in the paper, The Split-Apply-Combine Strategy for Data Analysis \<http://www.jstatsoft.org/v40/i01>, written by Hadley Wickham.

The DataFrames package supports the Split-Apply-Combine strategy through the by function, which takes in three arguments: (1) a DataFrame, (2) a column to split the DataFrame on, and (3) a function or expression to apply to each subset of the DataFrame.

We show several examples of the by function applied to the iris dataset below:

using DataFrames, RDatasets

iris = dataset("datasets", "iris")

by(iris, :Species, size)
by(iris, :Species, df -> mean(df[:PetalLength]))
by(iris, :Species, df -> DataFrame(N = size(df, 1)))

The by function also support the do block form:

by(iris, :Species) do df
   DataFrame(m = mean(df[:PetalLength]), s² = var(df[:PetalLength]))
end

A second approach to the Split-Apply-Combine strategy is implemented in the aggregate function, which also takes three arguments: (1) a DataFrame, (2) a column (or columns) to split the DataFrame on, and a (3) function (or several functions) that are used to compute a summary of each subset of the DataFrame. Each function is applied to each column, that was not used to split the DataFrame, creating new columns of the form $name_$function e.g. SepalLength_mean. Anonymous functions and expressions that do not have a name will be called λ1.

We show several examples of the aggregate function applied to the iris dataset below:

aggregate(iris, :Species, sum)
aggregate(iris, :Species, [sum, mean])

If you only want to split the data set into subsets, use the groupby function:

for subdf in groupby(iris, :Species)
    println(size(subdf, 1))
end