How to find the median for factor levels in R?

The second most used measure of central tendency median is calculated when we have ordinal data or the continuous data has outliers, also if there are factors data then we might need to find the median for levels to compare them with each other. The easiest way to do this is finding summary with aggregate function.

Example

Consider the below data frame that contains one factor column −

 Live Demo

set.seed(191)
x1<-as.factor(sample(LETTERS[1:3],20,replace=TRUE))
x2<-sample(1:10,20,replace=TRUE)
df1<-data.frame(x1,x2)
df1

Output

  x1 x2
1  B 6
2  C 5
3  B 4
4  C 8
5  B 5
6  B 5
7  A 4
8  C 8
9  C 3
10 C 4
11 B 9
12 A 10
13 C 6
14 C 1
15 A 10
16 A 3
17 A 5
18 C 7
19 B 3
20 C 1

Example

> str(df1)

Output

'data.frame': 20 obs. of 2 variables:
$ x1: Factor w/ 3 levels "A","B","C": 2 3 2 3 2 2 1 3 3 3 ...
$ x2: int 6 5 4 8 5 5 4 8 3 4 ...

Finding the median of x2 for the categories in x1 −

Example

aggregate(x2~x1,data=df1,summary)

Output

  x1 x2.Min. x2.1st Qu.x2.Median x2.Mean x2.3rd Qu.   x2.Max.
1 A 3.000000 4.000000 5.000000   6.400000 10.000000 10.000000
2 B 3.000000 4.250000 5.000000   5.333333 5.750000  9.000000
3 C 1.000000 3.000000 5.000000   4.777778 7.000000  8.000000

Let’s have a look at another example −

Example

 Live Demo

Temperature<-as.factor(sample(c("Cold","Hot"),20,replace=TRUE))
Sales<-sample(50000:80000,20)
df2<-data.frame(Temperature,Sales)
df2

Output

   Temperature Sales
1    Cold    72210
2    Cold    56758
3    Hot     53809
4    Hot     79977
5    Hot     77135
6    Cold    56932
7    Hot     51104
8    Cold    67742
9    Hot     75402
10   Hot     62546
11   Cold    68520
12   Hot     54575
13   Cold    51591
14   Hot    55232
15   Hot    77742
16   Hot    62507
17   Hot    62156
18   Cold   73853
19   Cold   69807
20   Hot    53930

Finding the median of Sales for the categories in Temperature −

Example

aggregate(Sales~Temperature,data=df2,summary)

Output

 Temperature Sales.Min. Sales.1st Qu. Sales.Median Sales.Mean Sales.3rd Qu.
1    Cold    51591.00    56888.50    68131.00       64676.62    70407.75
2    Hot     51104.00    54413.75    62331.50       63842.92    75835.25
 Sales.Max.
1 73853.00
2 79977.00