Table of Contents
One error you may encounter in R is:
Error in aggregate.data.frame(as.data.frame(x), ...) : arguments must have same length
This error occurs when you attempt to use the aggregate() function to summarize the values in one or more columns of a data frame in R but fail to specify the name of the data frame when referencing the columns.
This tutorial shares exactly how to fix this error.
How to Reproduce the Error
Suppose we have the following data frame in R:
#create data frame
df <- data.frame(team=c('A', 'A', 'A', 'A', 'A', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'C', 'C'),
points=c(5, 9, 12, 14, 14, 13, 10, 6, 15, 18))
#view data frame
df
team points
1 A 5
2 A 9
3 A 12
4 A 14
5 A 14
6 B 13
7 B 10
8 B 6
9 C 15
10 C 18
Now suppose we attempt to use the aggregate() function to calculate the mean points value, grouped by team:
#attempt to calculate mean points value by team
aggregate(df$points, list('team'), FUN=mean)
Error in aggregate.data.frame(as.data.frame(x), ...) :
arguments must have same length We receive an error because we failed to specify the name of the data frame in the list() argument.
How to Fix the Error
The way to fix this error is to simply use df$team instead of just ‘team’ in the list() argument:
#calculate mean points value by team
aggregate(df$points, list(df$team), FUN=mean)
Group.1 x
1 A 10.800000
2 B 9.666667
3 C 16.500000
Notice that we don’t receive any error this time because we specified the name of the data frame in the list() argument.
Note that if you use multiple column names in the list() argument then you will need to specify the data frame name for each column name or else you will receive an error.
The following tutorials explain how to troubleshoot other common errors in R:
How to Fix in R: longer object length is not a multiple of shorter object length