[R] obtaining first and last record for rows with same identifier

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Francisco J. Zagmutt wrote:
> If you want to obtain a data frame you can use the functions head and 
> tail like:
> 
> dat=data.frame(id=rep(1:5,3),num=rnorm(15), num2=rnorm(15))#Creates data 
> frame with id
> last=do.call("rbind",by(dat,dat$id,tail,1))#Selects the last observation 
> for each id
> first=do.call("rbind",by(dat,dat$id,head,1))#Selects the first 
> observation for each id
> newdat=rbind(first,last)#Joins data
> newdat=newdat[order(newdat$id),]#sorts data by id
> 
> Notice that rownames will give you the original row location of the 
> observations selected
> 
> I hope this helps
> 
> Francisco
> 
. . .

You might also look at section 4.3 of
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/pub/Main/RS/sintro.pdf
-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University