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How to implement guide with `dplyr::summarize()` returning unexpected results after `group_by()` in r

šŸ‘€ Views: 461 šŸ’¬ Answers: 1 šŸ“… Created: 2025-06-16
r dplyr data-manipulation R

I've spent hours debugging this and I'm working on a personal project and I'm experiencing unexpected behavior when using `dplyr` to group and summarize my data. After applying `group_by()` on my data frame, I expect the summarization to return the mean of a specific column correctly, but I keep getting incorrect results. Here's a snippet of my code: ```r library(dplyr) # Sample data frame my_data <- data.frame( group = c('A', 'A', 'B', 'B', 'C', 'C'), value = c(10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60) ) # Grouping and summarizing result <- my_data %>% group_by(group) %>% summarize(mean_value = mean(value)) print(result) ``` What I expected was a data frame with the mean values for each group ('A', 'B', 'C'), but instead, I am getting the following output: ``` # A tibble: 3 Ɨ 2 group mean_value <chr> <dbl> 1 A 20 2 B 35 3 C 55 ``` This output looks correct at first glance, but after double-checking the individual group calculations, I realize it doesn't match my manual calculations. I thought perhaps there was an scenario with how `NA` values are handled, but I'm not using any `NA` values in my dataset. I've tried using `summarize(mean_value = mean(value, na.rm = TRUE))`, but the results remain the same. I’m using `dplyr` version 1.0.8 and R version 4.1.1. Is there something I'm overlooking here? How can I ensure I'm getting the correct summaries for each group? My development environment is macOS. What's the best practice here? My team is using R for this desktop app. This is my first time working with R LTS. Thanks, I really appreciate it!