Introduction

In data analysis and manipulation tasks, it’s common to encounter situations where we need to identify and handle duplicate rows in a dataset. In this blog post, we will explore three different approaches to finding duplicate rows in R: the base R method, the dplyr package, and the data.table package. We’ll compare their performance using the benchmark function and provide insights on when to use each approach. So, grab your coding gear, and let’s dive in!

Setting the Stage

To demonstrate the approaches, we’ll create a sample dataset using the data.frame function. Our dataset will contain information about individuals, including their names and ages. We’ll generate a dataset with 300,000 rows, with three individuals repeated 100,000 times each.

library(rbenchmark)
library(dplyr)
library(data.table)

# Create a data.frame
df <- data.frame(
  name = rep(c("John", "Jane", "Mary"), each = 100000),
  age = sample(18:65, 300000, replace = TRUE)
)

Approach 1: Base R’s `duplicated` Function

The simplest approach to finding duplicate rows is to use the duplicated function from base R. This function returns a logical vector indicating which rows are duplicates. We can apply it directly to our data frame df.

duplicated_rows_base <- duplicated(df)

Approach 2: dplyr’s Concise Data Manipulation

The dplyr package provides an intuitive and concise way to manipulate data frames. We can leverage its chaining syntax to filter the duplicated rows. The group_by_all function groups the data frame by all columns, and filter(n() > 1) keeps only those rows with more than one occurrence within each group. Finally, ungroup removes the grouping information.

duplicated_rows_dplyr <- df |>
  group_by_all() |>
  filter(n() > 1) |>
  ungroup()

Approach 3: Efficient Duplicate Detection with data.table

If performance is a crucial factor, the data.table package offers highly optimized operations on large datasets. Converting our data frame to a data.table object allows us to utilize the efficient duplicated function from data.table.

dtdf <- data.table(df)
duplicated_rows_datatable <- duplicated(dtdf)

Benchmarking and Performance Comparison: To evaluate the performance of the three approaches, we will use the benchmark function from the rbenchmark package. We’ll execute each approach ten times and collect information such as execution time (elapsed), relative performance, and CPU times (user.self and sys.self).

benchmark(
  duplicated_rows_base = duplicated(df),
  duplicated_rows_dplyr = df |> 
    group_by_all() |> 
    filter(n() > 1) |>
    ungroup(),
  duplicated_rows_datatable = duplicated(dtdf),
  replications = 10,
  columns = c("test","replications","elapsed",
              "relative","user.self","sys.self")
) |>
  arrange(relative)

                       test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self
1 duplicated_rows_datatable           10    0.05      1.0      0.01     0.01
2     duplicated_rows_dplyr           10    0.29      5.8      0.27     0.02
3      duplicated_rows_base           10    3.53     70.6      3.45     0.08

Conclusion and Encouragement

Finding duplicate rows in large datasets is a common task, and having efficient approaches at hand can significantly impact data analysis workflows. In this blog post, we explored three different approaches: base R’s duplicated function, dplyr’s concise data manipulation, and data.table’s optimized duplicate detection.

We encourage you to try these approaches on your own datasets and explore their performance characteristics. Depending on your specific requirements, dataset size, and desired coding style, you can choose the approach that suits you best.

Remember, the world of R programming offers various tools and techniques to handle data efficiently, and experimenting with different approaches will broaden your understanding and improve your coding skills.