stack and unstack function in R

stack and unstack function in R are two important functions. Stacking vectors concatenates multiple vectors into a single vector along with a factor indicating where each observation originated using stack() function. Unstacking reverses this operation using unstack() function.

  •  Stack() function in R stacks a data set i.e. it converts a data set from unstacked form to stacked form.
  • Unstack() function in R unstacks a data set i.e. it converts the data set from stacked form to unstacked form.

stack and unstack function in R 1

 

Syntax for stack and unstack function in R:

stack(dataframe)

unstack(dataframe)

Stack and unstack function in R:

Lets use the “PlantGrowth” data set to demonstrate unstack function in R. PlantGrowth data set is shown below.

stack and unstack function in R 12

 

Example of unstack function in R:

unstack() function takes up the dataframe as argument and unstacks the dataframe as shown below.

# unstack function in R

df = PlantGrowth 
unstacked_df = unstack(df) 
unstacked_df

In the above example unstack() function in R converts the data from stacked form to unstacked form. So the output will be

     ctrl      trt1      trt2

1  4.17     4.81    6.31

2  5.58     4.17    5.12

3  5.18     4.41    5.54

4  6.11     3.59    5.50

5  4.50     5.87    5.37

6  4.61     3.83    5.29

7  5.17     6.03    4.92

8  4.53     4.89    6.15

9  5.33     4.32    5.80

10 5.14    4.69    5.26

unstack function in R by subsetting or selecting specific columns

Lets use the “PlantGrowth” data frame to demonstrate unstack() function in R.  unstack() function takes up “PlantGrowth” and selects first twenty rows and unstacks them as shown below.

 # unstack function in R

df<-PlantGrowth 
unstacked_list = (unstack(df[c(1:20),]))
unstacked_list

so the above code unstacks the dataframe and converts them into a list as shown below.

stack and unstack function in R 14

 

Example of stack function in R:

Lets use the above data frame to demonstrate stack() function in R.

 # stack function in R

 stacked_df = stack(unstacked_df)
 stacked_df

the above code stacks the data frame back to original data frame, so the output will be

stack and unstack function in R 12

 

Stack function in R by subsetting or selecting specific columns

Lets use the “unstacked_df” data frame to demonstrate stack() function with select argument in R. stack() function takes up “unstacked_df” and selects all the columns except “ctrl” column.

 # stack function in R

stacked_df1 = stack(unstacked_df, select = -ctrl) 
stacked_df1

the above code stacks the data frame back to original data frame except “ctrl” column, so the output will be

stack and unstack function in R 15

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Author

  • Sridhar Venkatachalam

    With close to 10 years on Experience in data science and machine learning Have extensively worked on programming languages like R, Python (Pandas), SAS, Pyspark.

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