How to select rows of a data frame that are not in other data frame in R?

Instead of finding the common rows, sometimes we need to find the uncommon rows between two data frames. It is mostly used when we expect that a large number of rows are uncommon instead of few ones. We can do this by using the negation operator which is represented by exclamation sign with subset function.

Example

Consider the below data frames −

 Live Demo

> x1<-sample(1:10,20,replace=TRUE)
> y1<-sample(1:10,20,replace=TRUE)
> df1<-data.frame(x1,y1)
> df1

Output

 x1 y1
1 10 6
2 5 9
3 10 10
4 4 10
5 1 6
6 1 4
7 9 3
8 5 10
9 10 3
10 8 2
11 6 10
12 6 3
13 9 3
14 3 6
15 6 9
16 9 1
17 7 9
18 3 8
19 2 5
20 4 9

Example

 Live Demo

> x2<-sample(1:10,20,replace=TRUE)
> y2<-sample(1:10,20,replace=TRUE)
> df2<-data.frame(x2,y2)
> df2

Output

 x2 y2
1 6 10
2 3 6
3 9 6
4 9 10
5 10 10
6 3 2
7 3 3
8 2 9
9 7 5
10 1 1
11 10 10
12 1 6
13 3 4
14 4 2
15 6 3
16 1 7
17 2 2
18 4 6
19 4 1
20 1 8

Now suppose we want to take a subset of df2 variable y2 that are not in y1 of df1, then it can be done as follows −

> subset(df2,!(y2%in%df1$y1))
x2 y2
16 1 7
<0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)

Similarly, taking a subset of df2 variable y2 that are not in x1 of df1, then it can be done as follows −

> subset(df2,!(y2%in%df1$x1))
[1] x2 y2
<0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)

Let’s have a look at one more example −

Example

 Live Demo

> x1<-rep(1:10,2)
> df1<-data.frame(x1)
> df1

Output

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

 Live Demo

> x2<-rep(1:5,4)
> df2<-data.frame(x2)
> df2

Output

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

> subset(df1,!(x1%in%df2$x2))

Output

 x1
6 6
7 7
8 8
9 9
10 10
16 6
17 7
18 8
19 9
20 10

Nizamuddin Siddiqui

Updated on 04-Sep-2020 12:04:21

• Related Questions & Answers
• How to select rows of an R data frame that are non-NA?
• How to select columns of an R data frame that are not in a vector?
• Remove rows from a data frame that exists in another data frame in R.
• How to find rows in an R data frame that do not have missing values?
• How to remove rows in R data frame that contains a specific number?
• How to remove rows from data frame in R that contains NaN?
• How to delete rows in an R data frame?
• How to add rows in an R data frame?
• How to plot rows of a data frame as lines in R?
• How to convert a character data frame to numeric data frame in R?
• How to remove rows that contains all zeros in an R data frame?
• How to repeat a column of a data frame and join it with another data frame in R by rows?
• How to select rows based on range of values of a column in an R data frame?
• How to randomly select a fixed number of rows without replacement from a data frame in R?
• How to multiply row values in a data frame having multiple rows with single row data frame in R?