To extract the unique combination of rows, we can subset the data frame with single square brackets and use the negation of the duplicated function after sorting the rows in the data frame. The sorting of the data frame can be done with the help of apply function and we will have to transpose the sorting as shown in the below examples. To understand how it works, do it in parts.
Consider the below data frame −
> x1<-rpois(20,1) > x2<-rpois(20,1) > df1<-data.frame(x1,x2) > df1
x1 x2 1 3 1 2 1 0 3 1 0 4 1 3 5 2 2 6 3 0 7 4 2 8 3 3 9 0 1 10 0 3 11 0 0 12 0 2 13 1 1 14 4 3 15 2 0 16 0 2 17 1 0 18 0 1 19 3 1 20 0 1
Extracting the unique combination of rows in df1 −
> df1[!duplicated(t(apply(df1,1,sort))),]
x1 x2 1 3 1 2 1 0 5 2 2 6 3 0 7 4 2 8 3 3 11 0 0 12 0 2 13 1 1 14 4 3
> y1<-sample(LETTERS[1:3],20,replace=TRUE) > y2<-sample(LETTERS[1:3],20,replace=TRUE) > df2<-data.frame(y1,y2) > df2
y1 y2 1 B B 2 C C 3 C B 4 A B 5 A C 6 C B 7 C B 8 B C 9 C B 10 A A 11 A A 12 A B 13 B B 14 B C 15 B C 16 B C 17 C A 18 C B 19 B C 20 C B
Extracting the unique combination of rows in df2 −
> df2[!duplicated(t(apply(df2,1,sort))),]
y1 y2 1 B B 2 C C 3 C B 4 A B 5 A C 10 A A