r - Count unique values

Perhaps table is what you are after?

dummyData = rep(c(1,2, 2, 2), 25)

table(dummyData)
# dummyData
#  1  2 
# 25 75

## or another presentation of the same data
as.data.frame(table(dummyData))
#    dummyData Freq
#  1         1   25
#  2         2   75

If you have multiple factors (= a multi-dimensional data frame), you can use the dplyr package to count unique values in each combination of factors:

library("dplyr")
data %>% group_by(factor1, factor2) %>% summarize(count=n())

It uses the pipe operator %>% to chain method calls on the data frame data.

It is a one-line approach by using aggregate.

> aggregate(data.frame(count = v), list(value = v), length)

  value count
1     1    25
2     2    75

table() function is a good way to go, as Chase suggested. If you are analyzing a large dataset, an alternative way is to use .N function in datatable package.

Make sure you installed the data table package by

install.packages("data.table")

Code:

# Import the data.table package
library(data.table)

# Generate a data table object, which draws a number 10^7 times  
# from 1 to 10 with replacement
DT<-data.table(x=sample(1:10,1E7,TRUE))

# Count Frequency of each factor level
DT[,.N,by=x]

To get an un-dimensioned integer vector that contains the count of unique values, use c().

dummyData = rep(c(1, 2, 2, 2), 25) # Chase's reproducible data
c(table(dummyData)) # get un-dimensioned integer vector
 1  2 
25 75

str(c(table(dummyData)) ) # confirm structure
 Named int [1:2] 25 75
 - attr(*, "names")= chr [1:2] "1" "2"

This may be useful if you need to feed the counts of unique values into another function, and is shorter and more idiomatic than the t(as.data.frame(table(dummyData))[,2] posted in a comment to Chase's answer. Thanks to Ricardo Saporta who pointed this out to me here.

This works for me. Take your vector v

length(summary(as.factor(v),maxsum=50000))

Comment: set maxsum to be large enough to capture the number of unique values

or with the magrittr package

v %>% as.factor %>% summary(maxsum=50000) %>% length

If you need to have the number of unique values as an additional column in the data frame containing your values (a column which may represent sample size for example), plyr provides a neat way:

data_frame <- data.frame(v = rep(c(1,2, 2, 2), 25))

library("plyr")
data_frame <- ddply(data_frame, .(v), transform, n = length(v))

Also making the values categorical and calling summary() would work.

> v = rep(as.factor(c(1,2, 2, 2)), 25)
> summary(v)
 1  2 
25 75 

You can try also a tidyverse

library(tidyverse) 
dummyData %>% 
    as.tibble() %>% 
    count(value)
# A tibble: 2 x 2
  value     n
  <dbl> <int>
1     1    25
2     2    75

If you want to run unique on a data.frame (e.g., train.data), and also get the counts (which can be used as the weight in classifiers), you can do the following:

unique.count = function(train.data, all.numeric=FALSE) {                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  # first convert each row in the data.frame to a string                                                                                                                                                                              
  train.data.str = apply(train.data, 1, function(x) paste(x, collapse=','))                                                                                                                                                           
  # use table to index and count the strings                                                                                                                                                                                          
  train.data.str.t = table(train.data.str)                                                                                                                                                                                            
  # get the unique data string from the row.names                                                                                                                                                                                     
  train.data.str.uniq = row.names(train.data.str.t)                                                                                                                                                                                   
  weight = as.numeric(train.data.str.t)                                                                                                                                                                                               
  # convert the unique data string to data.frame
  if (all.numeric) {
    train.data.uniq = as.data.frame(t(apply(cbind(train.data.str.uniq), 1, 
      function(x) as.numeric(unlist(strsplit(x, split=","))))))                                                                                                    
  } else {
    train.data.uniq = as.data.frame(t(apply(cbind(train.data.str.uniq), 1, 
      function(x) unlist(strsplit(x, split=",")))))                                                                                                    
  }
  names(train.data.uniq) = names(train.data)                                                                                                                                                                                          
  list(data=train.data.uniq, weight=weight)                                                                                                                                                                                           
}  

count_unique_words <-function(wlist) {
ucountlist = list()
unamelist = c()
for (i in wlist)
{
if (is.element(i, unamelist))
    ucountlist[[i]] <- ucountlist[[i]] +1
else
    {
    listlen <- length(ucountlist)
    ucountlist[[i]] <- 1
    unamelist <- c(unamelist, i)
    }
}
ucountlist
}

expt_counts <- count_unique_words(population)
for(i in names(expt_counts))
    cat(i, expt_counts[[i]], "\n")