How to select the rows with maximum values in each group with dplyr?

I would like to select a row with maximum value in each group with dplyr.

Firstly I generate some random data to show my question

set.seed(1)
df <- expand.grid(list(A = 1:5, B = 1:5, C = 1:5))
df$value <- runif(nrow(df))

In plyr, I could use a custom function to select this row.

library(plyr)
ddply(df, .(A, B), function(x) x[which.max(x$value),])

In dplyr, I am using this code to get the maximum value, but not the rows with maximum value (Column C in this case).

library(dplyr)
df %>% group_by(A, B) %>%
	summarise(max = max(value))

How could I achieve this? Thanks for any suggestion.

sessionInfo()
R version 3.1.0 (2014-04-10)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                      
[5] LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] dplyr_0.2  plyr_1.8.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] assertthat_0.1.0.99 parallel_3.1.0      Rcpp_0.11.1        
[4] tools_3.1.0        

Try this:

result <- df %>% 
             group_by(A, B) %>%
             filter(value == max(value)) %>%
             arrange(A,B,C)

Seems to work:

identical(
  as.data.frame(result),
  ddply(df, .(A, B), function(x) x[which.max(x$value),])
)
#[1] TRUE

As pointed out in the comments, slice may be preferred here as per @RoyalITS' answer below if you strictly only want 1 row per group. This answer will return multiple rows if there are multiple with an identical maximum value.

df %>% group_by(A,B) %>% slice(which.max(value))

You can use top_n

df %>% group_by(A, B) %>% top_n(n=1)

This will rank by the last column (value) and return the top n=1 rows.

Currently, you can't change the this default without causing an error (See https://github.com/hadley/dplyr/issues/426)

This more verbose solution provides greater control on what happens in case of duplicate maximum value (in this example, it will take one of the corresponding rows randomly)

library(dplyr)
df %>% group_by(A, B) %>%
  mutate(the_rank  = rank(-value, ties.method = "random")) %>%
  filter(the_rank == 1) %>% select(-the_rank)

More generally, I think you might want to get "top" of the rows that are sorted within a given group.

For the case of where a single value is max'd out, you have essentially sorted by only one column. However, it's often useful to hierarchically sort by multiple columns (for example: a date column and a time-of-day column).

# Answering the question of getting row with max "value".
df %>% 
  # Within each grouping of A and B values.
  group_by( A, B) %>% 
  # Sort rows in descending order by "value" column.
  arrange( desc(value) ) %>% 
  # Pick the top 1 value
  slice(1) %>% 
  # Remember to ungroup in case you want to do further work without grouping.
  ungroup()

# Answering an extension of the question of 
# getting row with the max value of the lowest "C".
df %>% 
  # Within each grouping of A and B values.
  group_by( A, B) %>% 
  # Sort rows in ascending order by C, and then within that by 
  # descending order by "value" column.
  arrange( C, desc(value) ) %>% 
  # Pick the one top row based on the sort
  slice(1) %>% 
  # Remember to ungroup in case you want to do further work without grouping.
  ungroup()

For me, it helped to count the number of values per group. Copy the count table into a new object. Then filter for the max of the group based on the first grouping characteristic. For example:

count_table  <- df %>%
                group_by(A, B) %>%
                count() %>%
                arrange(A, desc(n))

count_table %>% 
    group_by(A) %>%
    filter(n == max(n))

or

count_table %>% 
    group_by(A) %>%
    top_n(1, n)