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counting frequencies across two columns

5 messages · Jason Priem, milton ruser, Patrick Connolly +2 more

#
I've got a data frame describing comments on an electronic journal, 
wherein each row is a unique comment, like so:

  commentID  author articleID
1         1   smith         2
2         2   jones         3
3         3 andrews         2
4         4   jones         1
5         5 johnson         3
6         6   smith         2

I want know the number of unique authors per article.  I can get a table 
of article frequencies with table(articleID), but I can't figure out how 
to count frequencies in a different column.  I'm sure there's an easy 
way, but I guess I'm too new at this to find it.  Thanks for your help!

Jason Priem
PhD student, School of Information and Library Science, University of 
North Carolina-Chapel Hill
#
On Sun, 01-Nov-2009 at 01:20AM -0500, Jason Priem wrote:

            
Let's call that dataframe x
I'm not clear what you require, but maybe it's this:
articleID andrews johnson jones smith
        1       0       0     1     0
        2       1       0     0     2
        3       0       1     1     0

Is that anything like what you're after?
#
On Nov 1, 2009, at 1:59 AM, Patrick Connolly wrote:

            
You've had two guesses so far and my guess increments the count.

Were you attempting to specify this?

df1 <- read.table(textConnection("commentID  author articleID
1         1   smith         2
2         2   jones         3
3         3 andrews         2
4         4   jones         1
5         5 johnson         3
6         6   smith         2"), header=T)

 > lapply( lapply(tapply(df1$author, df1$articleID, I), unique) ,  
length)
$`1`
[1] 1

$`2`
[1] 2

$`3`
[1] 2

Or delivered in matrix form (and using Connolly's approach as  
intermediate:

 > apply( with(df1, table(articleID, author)), 1, function(x) sum(x>0) )
1 2 3
1 2 2
--

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT