I have a question regarding cleaning data/checking observations. Due to privacy issues, I cannot share the full code or data. I can illustrate what I want to achieve with an example. Suppose this is my dataset.

And suppose I want to count the number of different individuals in this dataset. Then, in this case, it would be 4 ('101', '102', '103', '104'). But, I have this in a very extended way. Is there an easy way to check how many individuals the total dataset has?

Hopefully, somebody can help :) I think there should be an easy solution to this, but googling hasn't helped so far.

CodePudding user response：

Here is your example data:

data <- data.frame(Individual = c(101, 101, 102, 103, 104, 104, 104),
                   Year = c("2018", "2019", "2019", "2019", "2017", "2018", "2019"))

Looks like this:

  Individual Year
1        101 2018
2        101 2019
3        102 2019
4        103 2019
5        104 2017
6        104 2018
7        104 2019

To count the number of unique values in a column, you can use the following code:

length(unique(data$Individual))

The output is:

[1] 4

The output is in this case 4.