How to Remove Duplicate Rows while Retaining a User Specified Column

General
1

I have a dataframe like this and want to remove duplicates (in preparation for tsne), but I want to retain my id (not R generated) column so I can later join the dataframe results back to a broader data set for contextual analysis.

id var1 var2 var3......etc. many more vars...
1 1 1 1
2 1 1 1
3 9 5 2
4 9 3 4
5 8 6 2

I'm trying to get this result, removing the id 2 record:
1 1 1 1
3 9 5 2
4 9 3 4
5 8 6 2

Any suggestions on this seemingly simple requirement?

Second question, although I'm using my own generated ids I've yet to figure out what the R dataframe column is called since it shows up as blank in views. Is it possible to call the R row id field using df$rowid? Curious if this is the syntax?

thank you!

2

dplyr::distinct() may help? This function removes duplicated rows from your dataset, and you can keep your id variable.

The function description is here: https://dplyr.tidyverse.org/reference/distinct.html

Another relevant post I found with Google: https://www.datanovia.com/en/lessons/identify-and-remove-duplicate-data-in-r/

3

good resources, and I probably just need to dig in some more. I was thinking there might be an expression or argument in unique or distinct which allows the user to specify the any columns to ignore.

4

I capture a screenshot from the function description:

Screenshot 2020-09-18 152357
Screenshot 2020-09-18 152357853×299 23.2 KB

5

thanks, I also had my eye on this. Like everything I just need to figure out the syntax, I'm still quite new to R. Appreciate your help!

6

ok, looks like distinct and unique can't meet my requirements allowing me to easily pick df columns to exclude from unique. However, I was able to solve this by using row.names(df) to get the id's of rows so I could merge data back into the results of the unique function.