There are many situations where data sets are broken into multiple tables, and multiple reasons that this might make sense—sometimes it is easier to collect data in different pieces, other times it is to reduce the file size. Regardless of the reason for splitting data sets into multiple tables, they should always formatted in such a way that there is at least one common column between the tables so that they can be merged as needed. In this example we will explore how to use the join suite of functions found in the dplyr package to merge these data tables.
Note: In R, most tabular sets of data are called data frames. Data frames can store objects of different classes (e.g. some columns can be text and other columns can be integers). A synonymous term is data table, which is used by some textbooks and other languages, such as the structued query language (SQL).
To begin, let’s ensure that dplyr is loaded.
library(dplyr)To illustrate the different join functions we will use a small example of a customer database. We will focus on two tables: orders which contains the order number, customer ID, and date of the order; and customers which contains the customer ID and customer name. These are intentionally small data tables so that is easier to see how the join statements are working.
orders <- read.csv("data/orders.csv", as.is = TRUE)
orders## order id date
## 1 1 4 Jan-01
## 2 2 8 Feb-01
## 3 3 42 Apr-15
## 4 4 50 Apr-17customers <- read.csv("data/customers.csv", as.is = TRUE)
customers## id name
## 1 4 Tukey
## 2 8 Wickham
## 3 15 Mason
## 4 16 Jordan
## 5 23 Patil
## 6 42 CoxThe the dplyr package provides six different join functions, each merges two data tables together in a different way. The best way to understand these functions is to see how each works in our small example.
All of the functions have the same three arguments:
| argument | explanation |
|---|---|
x |
the first (left) table to join |
y |
the second (right) table to join |
by |
a character vector of variables to join by, notice that the column name must always be in quotes. |
inner_join creates a new table which is restricted to cases where the values of “by variable” exist in both data sets. All columns from both data sets are returned for these cases.
inner_join(x = orders, y = customers, by = "id")## order id date name
## 1 1 4 Jan-01 Tukey
## 2 2 8 Feb-01 Wickham
## 3 3 42 Apr-15 CoxRemark
In this inner_join, we lose the row for order 4 from the orders table because customer 50 does not appear in the customers data table. We also lose lose orders 15, 16 and 23 from the customers table. Note the columns order, date and name are also returned.
left_join returns all cases from the x data table, regardless of whether there are matching values of the by variable(s) in y. All columns from both data tables are returned for these cases.
left_join(x = orders, y = customers, by = "id")## order id date name
## 1 1 4 Jan-01 Tukey
## 2 2 8 Feb-01 Wickham
## 3 3 42 Apr-15 Cox
## 4 4 50 Apr-17 <NA>Remark
This new data frame now includes the name column. Since customer 50 does not appear in the customers data table, an NA (missing value) is used for their name.
right_join returns all cases from the y data table, regardless of whether there are matching values of the by variable(s) in x. All columns from both data tables are returned for these cases.
right_join(x = orders, y = customers, by = "id")## order id date name
## 1 1 4 Jan-01 Tukey
## 2 2 8 Feb-01 Wickham
## 3 NA 15 <NA> Mason
## 4 NA 16 <NA> Jordan
## 5 NA 23 <NA> Patil
## 6 3 42 Apr-15 CoxRemark
We have added the order and date columns to the customers data table. Customers 15, 16, and 23 did not make purchases during this time frame, so missing values (NAs) are used for their order and date values.
full_join returns all rows and columns from both x and y.
full_join(x = orders, y = customers, by = "id")## order id date name
## 1 1 4 Jan-01 Tukey
## 2 2 8 Feb-01 Wickham
## 3 3 42 Apr-15 Cox
## 4 4 50 Apr-17 <NA>
## 5 NA 15 <NA> Mason
## 6 NA 16 <NA> Jordan
## 7 NA 23 <NA> PatilRemark
We have fully merged the orders and customers data tables; thus, we get all of the columns and all of the rows from both data tables. NAs fill in the necessary values for customers not making purchases and for orders without a customer record.
semi_join returns all rows from the x data table where there are matching values of the by variable(s) in y, and only the columns from x.
semi_join(x = orders, y = customers, by = "id")## order id date
## 1 1 4 Jan-01
## 2 2 8 Feb-01
## 3 3 42 Apr-15Remark
We lose the row for order 4 because customer 50 does not appear in the customers data table.
Above, the inner_join and semi_join returned the same number of rows, but this will not always be the case. For example, suppose that customer 42 also placed an order on May-01 so that we have multiple orders from the same customer.
extra_order <- data.frame(order = 5, id = 42, date = "May-01")
extra_order## order id date
## 1 5 42 May-01orders2 <- rbind(orders, extra_order)
orders2## order id date
## 1 1 4 Jan-01
## 2 2 8 Feb-01
## 3 3 42 Apr-15
## 4 4 50 Apr-17
## 5 5 42 May-01inner_join(x = customers, y = orders2, by = "id")## id name order date
## 1 4 Tukey 1 Jan-01
## 2 8 Wickham 2 Feb-01
## 3 42 Cox 3 Apr-15
## 4 42 Cox 5 May-01semi_join(x = customers, y = orders2, by = "id")## id name
## 1 4 Tukey
## 2 8 Wickham
## 3 42 CoxRemark
The result of the inner_join includes two rows for customer 42 because inner_join returns all of the columns from both data tables for ids that match. The result of the semi_join only returns one row for each customer because it only returns the rows from customers that have matching ids in orders2.
anti_join returns all rows from the x data table where there are not matching values of the by variable(s) in y, and only the columns from x.
anti_join(x = orders, y = customers, by = "id")## order id date
## 1 4 50 Apr-17Remark
Order 4 is the only order from a customer without a record in the customers data table, so it is the only row of orders returned.
anti_join(x = customers, y = orders, by = "id")## id name
## 1 15 Mason
## 2 16 Jordan
## 3 23 PatilRemark
Customers 15, 16, and 23 did not place orders during this time frame, so their entries from the customers data table are returned.
All of our examples have only used a single column to match the entries between the data tables, and has also assumed that the columns will have identical names. This will not always be the case. Below we detail how to refine what variables you merge by.
If you want to join by multiple variables, then you need to specify a vector of variable names: by = c("var1", "var2", "var3"). Here all three columns must match in both tables.
If you want to use all variables that appear in both tables, then you can leave the by argument blank.
If the variable you wish to join by is not named identically in both tables, then you specify by = c("left_var" = "right_var").
Another issue that crops up occasionally is duplicate entries in the variable(s) that you wish to merge by. We saw one example of this above when there were two orders from the same customer. In that case the id value was unique in the customer table, but not in the orders table. The result of this join is quite logical, as seen above. If, however, both tables contain duplicate entries in the variable(s) that you wish to merge by, all possible combinations of these entries are returned. A simple example for a full_join is shown below:
# Creating example data frames
table1 <- data.frame(key = c("a", "a", "b", "b", "c"), var = 1:5)
table1## key var
## 1 a 1
## 2 a 2
## 3 b 3
## 4 b 4
## 5 c 5table2 <- data.frame(key = c("a", "a", "b", "b", "c"), var = LETTERS[1:5])
table2## key var
## 1 a A
## 2 a B
## 3 b C
## 4 b D
## 5 c E# A full join
full_join(x = table1, y = table2, by = "key")## key var.x var.y
## 1 a 1 A
## 2 a 1 B
## 3 a 2 A
## 4 a 2 B
## 5 b 3 C
## 6 b 3 D
## 7 b 4 C
## 8 b 4 D
## 9 c 5 EIn this situtaion, the results for left_join, right_join, and full_join will be identical.
The files books.csv, authors.csv, and book-authors.csv give details about the planned summer reading of a statistics student. books.csv provides details for each book (isbn, title, year, and genre), authors.csv provides details about each author (authorid, first name, last name, and nationality), and book-authors.csv provides the author identification (authorid) for each isbn (books with multiple authors will have multiple rows).
Read the three files into R, naming them books, authors, and book_authors.
Use the appropriate join statement to add the ISBNs to the authors data table. Why does the resulting data frame have 31 rows instead of 11?
To eliminate the duplicate rows of your data frame from #6 (which we’ll assume you named df2) run the following code (change the object names to align with your code as necessary):
df2 <- unique(df2)
Use the appropriate join statement to add the author information table from #3 to the books data table.
Are there any authors in the authors data table that do not correspond to books in the books data table? Use an appropriate join statement to do this.
After reading A Game of Thrones the student decides to read the rest of the series over the summer. books2.csv contains the updated books on the student’s reading list. Read this file into R, naming it books2.
Use the same join statement that you did in #4, but using books2 rather than books.
RStudio’s data wrangling cheat sheet provides a nice summary of how to combine data sets.
dplyr vignette on two table verbs provides additional examples of merging data tables.