Determine the number of NA values in a column
RDataframeR Problem Overview
I want to count the number of NA
values in a data frame column. Say my data frame is called df
, and the name of the column I am considering is col
. The way I have come up with is following:
sapply(df$col, function(x) sum(length(which(is.na(x)))))
Is this a good/most efficient way to do this?
R Solutions
Solution 1 - R
You're over-thinking the problem:
sum(is.na(df$col))
Solution 2 - R
If you are looking for NA
counts for each column in a dataframe then:
na_count <-sapply(x, function(y) sum(length(which(is.na(y)))))
should give you a list with the counts for each column.
na_count <- data.frame(na_count)
Should output the data nicely in a dataframe like:
----------------------
| row.names | na_count
------------------------
| column_1 | count
Solution 3 - R
Try the colSums
function
df <- data.frame(x = c(1,2,NA), y = rep(NA, 3))
colSums(is.na(df))
#x y
#1 3
Solution 4 - R
A quick and easy Tidyverse solution to get a NA
count for all columns is to use summarise_all()
which I think makes a much easier to read solution than using purrr
or sapply
library(tidyverse)
# Example data
df <- tibble(col1 = c(1, 2, 3, NA),
col2 = c(NA, NA, "a", "b"))
df %>% summarise_all(~ sum(is.na(.)))
#> # A tibble: 1 x 2
#> col1 col2
#> <int> <int>
#> 1 1 2
Or using the more modern across()
function:
df %>% summarise(across(everything(), ~ sum(is.na(.))))
Solution 5 - R
If you are looking to count the number of NAs in the entire dataframe you could also use
sum(is.na(df))
Solution 6 - R
In the summary()
output, the function also counts the NA
s so one can use this function if one wants the sum of NA
s in several variables.
Solution 7 - R
A tidyverse way to count the number of nulls in every column of a dataframe:
library(tidyverse)
library(purrr)
df %>%
map_df(function(x) sum(is.na(x))) %>%
gather(feature, num_nulls) %>%
print(n = 100)
Solution 8 - R
This form, slightly changed from Kevin Ogoros's one:
na_count <-function (x) sapply(x, function(y) sum(is.na(y)))
returns NA counts as named int array
Solution 9 - R
sapply(name of the data, function(x) sum(is.na(x)))
Solution 10 - R
User rrs answer is right but that only tells you the number of NA values in the particular column of the data frame that you are passing to get the number of NA values for the whole data frame try this:
apply(<name of dataFrame>, 2<for getting column stats>, function(x) {sum(is.na(x))})
This does the trick
Solution 11 - R
Try this:
length(df$col[is.na(df$col)])
Solution 12 - R
I read a csv file from local directory. Following code works for me.
# to get number of which contains na
sum(is.na(df[, c(columnName)]) # to get number of na row
# to get number of which not contains na
sum(!is.na(df[, c(columnName)])
#here columnName is your desire column name
Solution 13 - R
Similar to hute37's answer but using the purrr
package. I think this tidyverse approach is simpler than the answer proposed by AbiK.
library(purrr)
map_dbl(df, ~sum(is.na(.)))
Note: the tilde (~
) creates an anonymous function. And the '.' refers to the input for the anonymous function, in this case the data.frame df
.
Solution 14 - R
If you're looking for null values in each column to be printed one after the other then you can use this. Simple solution.
lapply(df, function(x) { length(which(is.na(x)))})
Solution 15 - R
You can use this to count number of NA or blanks in every column
colSums(is.na(data_set_name)|data_set_name == '')
Solution 16 - R
In the interests of completeness you can also use the useNA
argument in table. For example table(df$col, useNA="always")
will count all of non NA
cases and the NA
ones.