Why mean is NaN even if na.rm is set to TRUE using dplyr in R?

If na.rm is set to TRUE using dplyr package then the output for statistical operations returns NaN. To avoid this, we need to exclude na.rm. Follow below steps to understand the difference between the tw −

• First of all, create a data frame.
• Summarise the data frame with na.rm set to TRUE if NA exists in the data frame.
• Summarise the data frame without setting na.rm to TRUE.

Create the data frame

Let's create a data frame as shown below −

 Live Demo

Group&li;-rep(c("First","Second","Third"),times=c(3,10,7))
Response&li;-rep(c(NA,3,4,5,7,8),times=c(3,2,5,2,4,4))
df&li;-data.frame(Group,Response)
df

On executing, the above script generates the below output(this output will vary on your system due to randomization) −

Group Response
1 First NA
2 First NA
3 First NA
4 Second 3
5 Second 3
6 Second 4
7 Second 4
8 Second 4
9 Second 4
10 Second 4
11 Second 5
12 Second 5
13 Second 7
14 Third 7
15 Third 7
16 Third 7
17 Third 8
18 Third 8
19 Third 8
20 Third 8

Summarising data frame with na.rm set to TRUE

Loading dplyr package and summarise the data frame df with mean of Response per group −

library(dplyr)
Group<-rep(c("First","Second","Third"),times=c(3,10,7))
Response<-rep(c(NA,3,4,5,7,8),times=c(3,2,5,2,4,4))
df<-data.frame(Group,Response)
df%>%group_by(Group)%>%summarise(mean=mean(Response,na.rm=TRUE))

# A tibble: 3 x 2
Group mean
  <chr> <dbl>
1 First NaN
2 Second 4.3
3 Third 7.57

Summarising the data frame without setting na.rm to TRUE

Summarise the data frame df with mean of Response per group without setting na.rm to TRUE −

Group<-rep(c("First","Second","Third"),times=c(3,10,7))
Response<-rep(c(NA,3,4,5,7,8),times=c(3,2,5,2,4,4))
df<-data.frame(Group,Response)
df%>%group_by(Group)%>%summarise(mean=mean(Response))

# A tibble: 3 x 2
Group mean
  <chr> <dbl>
1 First NA
2 Second 4.3
3 Third 7.57

Nizamuddin Siddiqui

Updated on: 13-Aug-2021

569 Views

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