unexpected (?) behavior of sort=TRUE in merge function

Rui,

Thanks for looking into this. I apologize, I should've added my output, maybe it looks differently on my machine than on others. I also should have made my question more explicit: I'm not looking for a solution to get the sorting one way or another, I have that already. I rather want to understand why the same code behaves differently on two very similar datasets (one just having less rows, see below).

The first call gives the following for me:

lapply(test, function(x) merge(x, expand.grid(product=c("Y1", "Y2", "G", "F", "L", "K"), cong=c(-1,0,1,11)), all=T, sort=TRUE))

[[1]]
    product cong        x
1        F   -1 5.857143
2        F    0 3.625000
3        F    1 4.782609
4        F   11 6.301887
5        G   -1 7.300000
6        G    0 4.800000
7        G    1 4.424242
8        G   11 5.781250
9        K   -1 4.375000
10       K    0 4.714286
11       K    1 3.804348
12       K   11 5.566038
13       L   -1 7.272727
14       L    0 6.250000
15       L    1 4.875000
16       L   11 6.877551
17      Y1   -1 5.857143
18      Y1    0 3.875000
19      Y1    1 3.535714
20      Y1   11 5.731707
21      Y2   -1 5.900000
22      Y2    0 2.500000
23      Y2    1 4.638889
24      Y2   11 5.419355

[[2]]
    product cong        x
1       Y1   -1 3.043478
2       Y1    0 4.887640
3       Y1    1       NA
4       Y1   11       NA
5       Y2   -1 4.181818
6       Y2    0 5.207921
7       Y2    1       NA
8       Y2   11       NA
9        G   -1 3.750000
10       G    0 5.680000
11       G    1       NA
12       G   11       NA
13       F   -1 4.315789
14       F    0 5.705263
15       F    1       NA
16       F   11       NA
17       L   -1 4.500000
18       L    0 6.386364
19       L    1       NA
20       L   11       NA
21       K   -1 3.739130
22       K    0 4.967033
23       K    1       NA
24       K   11       NA
  

So different from what you may have observed, here the first data set [[1]] is sorted by label of "product", not by value. As you correctly stated, Y1" is coded as 1, "Y2" as 2, etc., but the first rows are for F, followed by G etc. The second [[2]] is sorted by level (value). So I have different behavior on very similar looking data sets, and hence to me at least one of those cannot be "right" according to documentation (but I agree with you that the second is correct according to the help). In my larger example, it seems as if data sets which do not originally have all combinations of product and cong anyway are sorted like [[2]], and those that are complete (all 24 combinations occur) are sorted like [[1]] is, which to me is still "unexpected".

Hope this clarifies my question.

Any thoughts appreciated.
Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: Rui Barradas [mailto:ruipbarradas at sapo.pt]
Sent: Dienstag, 4. September 2012 14:01
To: Meyners, Michael
Cc: r-help
Subject: Re: [R] unexpected (?) behavior of sort=TRUE in merge function

Hello,

Inline.
Em 04-09-2012 12:24, Meyners, Michael escreveu:

All,

I realize from the archive that the sort argument in merge has been
subject to discussion before, though I couldn't find an explanation for
this behavior. I tried to simplify this to (kind of) minimal code from
a real example to the following (and I have no doubts that there are
smart people around achieving the same with smarter code :-)). I'm
running R 2.15.1 64bit under MS Windows 7, full session info below.

I do have a list with two dataframes:

test <- list(structure(list(product = structure(c(1L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 5L,
6L, 1L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 5L, 6L, 1L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 5L, 6L, 1L, 2L, 3L,
4L, 5L, 6L), .Label = c("Y1", "Y2", "G", "F", "L", "K"), class =
"factor"),
     cong = c(-1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1,
     1, 1, 1, 1, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11), x = c(5.85714285714286,
     5.9, 7.3, 5.85714285714286, 7.27272727272727, 4.375, 3.875,
     2.5, 4.8, 3.625, 6.25, 4.71428571428571, 3.53571428571429,
     4.63888888888889, 4.42424242424242, 4.78260869565217, 4.875,
     3.80434782608696, 5.73170731707317, 5.41935483870968, 5.78125,
     6.30188679245283, 6.87755102040816, 5.56603773584906)), .Names =
c("product",
"cong", "x"), row.names = c(NA, -24L), class = "data.frame"),
     structure(list(product = structure(c(1L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 5L,
     6L, 1L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 5L, 6L), .Label = c("Y1", "Y2", "G",
     "F", "L", "K"), class = "factor"), cong = c(-1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0), x = c(3.04347826086957,
4.18181818181818,
     3.75, 4.31578947368421, 4.5, 3.73913043478261, 4.8876404494382,
     5.20792079207921, 5.68, 5.70526315789474, 6.38636363636364,
     4.96703296703297)), .Names = c("product", "cong", "x"), row.names =
c(NA,
     -12L), class = "data.frame"))


The dataframes are pretty much the same but for the values in the x-
column and the fact that the second one has only half as many
observations, missing the second half of the expand.grid if you like.
Now if I run

lapply(test, function(x) merge(x, expand.grid(product=c("Y1", "Y2",
"G", "F", "L", "K"), cong=c(-1,0,1,11)), all=T, sort=TRUE))	  #
sort=TRUE is the default, so could be omitted

sorts the first dataframe according to the labels of factor "product"

No, it doesn't. It sorts according to the columns, i.e., the values,
not according to the labels.
The help page clearly states that the argument 'sort' is "logical.
Should the results be sorted on the by columns?"

And "Y1" is coded as 1, "Y2" as 2, etc. The output is right.

Try the following.

test2 <- test
test2[[1]]$product <- as.character(test[[1]]$product)
test2[[2]]$product <- as.character(test[[2]]$product)

# To make it more readable.
grd <- expand.grid(product=c("Y1", "Y2", "G", "F", "L", "K"), cong=c(-
1,0,1,11))

lapply(test2, function(x) merge(x, grd, all=T, sort=TRUE))

And now 'product' sorts from "F" to "Y2", even if grd$product is still
a factor with the same coding as in 'test'.

Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

, while for the second one the order is maintained from the first
dataframes (x) to merge (which is the difference that I could not find
being documented). Now I run the same code with sort=FALSE instead:

lapply(test, function(x) merge(x, expand.grid(product=c("Y1", "Y2",
"G", "F", "L", "K"), cong=c(-1,0,1,11)), all=T, sort=FALSE))

The results are at least consistent and fulfill my needs (this is, btw,
not unexpected from the documentation). Note that I get exactly the
same behavior if I apply merge subsequently to test[[1]] and test[[2]],
so it is not an issue from lapply. (I realize that my dataframes are
ordered by levels of product, but using test[[2]] <-
test[[2]][sample(12),] and applying the same code as above reveals that
indeed no sorting is done but the order is maintained from the first
dataframe.)

I have a working solution for myself, so I'm not after any advice on
how to achieve the sorting -- I'd just like to better understand what's
going on here and/or what I might have missed in the documentation or
in the list archives.

Thanks in advance,
Michael



Session info:
R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22)
Platform: x86_64-pc-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=German_Germany.1252  LC_CTYPE=German_Germany.1252
LC_MONETARY=German_Germany.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
LC_TIME=German_Germany.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_2.15.1