average duplicated rows?

Dear useRs,

I have a slightly complicated data structure and am stuck trying to extract what I need. I'm pasting an example of this data below. In some cases, there are duplicates in the "gene_id" column because there are two different "sample 1" values for a given "sample 2" value. Where these duplicates exist, I need to average the corresponding "FL_EARLY" values and retain the "FL_LATE" value and replace those two rows with a row containing the "FL_EARLY" average so that I no longer have any "gene_id" duplicates.

Seems like this is a job for some version of the apply function, but searching and puzzling over this has not gotten me anywhere. Any help will be much appreciated!

Example data:


              gene_id sample_1 sample_2   FL_EARLY  FL_LATE
763938  Eucgr.A00054   fl_S1E   fl_S1L  13.170800  22.2605
763979  Eucgr.A00101   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   0.367960  14.1202
1273243 Eucgr.A00101    fl_S2   fl_S1L   0.356625  14.1202
764169  Eucgr.A00350   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   7.381070  43.9275
1273433 Eucgr.A00350    fl_S2   fl_S1L  10.674500  43.9275
1273669 Eucgr.A00650    fl_S2   fl_S1L  33.669100  50.0169
764480  Eucgr.A00744   fl_S1E   fl_S1L 132.429000 747.2770
1273744 Eucgr.A00744    fl_S2   fl_S1L 142.659000 747.2770
764595  Eucgr.A00890   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   2.937760  14.9647
764683  Eucgr.A00990   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   8.681250  48.5492
1273947 Eucgr.A00990    fl_S2   fl_S1L  10.553300  48.5492
764710  Eucgr.A01020   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   0.000000  57.9273
1273974 Eucgr.A01020    fl_S2   fl_S1L   0.000000  57.9273
764756  Eucgr.A01073   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   8.504710 101.1870
1274020 Eucgr.A01073    fl_S2   fl_S1L   5.400010 101.1870
764773  Eucgr.A01091   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   3.448910  15.7756
764826  Eucgr.A01152   fl_S1E   fl_S1L  69.565700 198.2320
764831  Eucgr.A01158   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   7.265640  30.9565
764845  Eucgr.A01172   fl_S1E   fl_S1L   3.248020  16.9127
764927  Eucgr.A01269   fl_S1E   fl_S1L  18.710200  76.6918



--Kelly V.


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