Duplicated data can exist in different rows and columns and user may need to treat observations (rows) connected by duplicated data as one observation, e.g. companies can belong to one family (and thus: be one company) by sharing some telephone numbers. This package provides a function to find connected rows based on data on chosen columns and collapse it into one row.
Function from this package was used in CATI surveys (especially on businesses databases) to minimize the chance that interviewers will call independently the same respondent and thus irritate her or him. It is a chance that the same, suitable person to participate in the survey, works in more than one company and that these companies exist as a separate records in the database (sometimes just as a separate companies, sometimes as a branches). When trying to find participant in company X, interviewer can be switched to company C to speak with employee E and the second interviewer, when calling company Y, can also be switched to company C to speak with employee E. If some data in database (like phone numbers) can be use to collapse companies X, Y and C into one record, the chance for this inconvenience will be much lower.
You can install the released version of dedupewider from CRAN with:
And the development version from GitHub with:
library(dedupewider)
initial_table <- data.frame(tel_1 = c(111, 222, 444, 555),
tel_2 = c(222, 666, 666, 555),
tel_3 = c(NA, NA, NA, 555),
tel_4 = c(NA, NA, NA, 555),
tel_5 = c(NA, NA, NA, 555),
name = paste0("name", 1:4),
nace = c("01.19", "01.64", "55.90", "09.10"))
# Rows 1, 2 and 3 share the same phone number and thus will be collapsed into one row
# In row 4 the same phone number will be removed to leave only unique entry (555)
initial_table
#> tel_1 tel_2 tel_3 tel_4 tel_5 name nace
#> 1 111 222 NA NA NA name1 01.19
#> 2 222 666 NA NA NA name2 01.64
#> 3 444 666 NA NA NA name3 55.90
#> 4 555 555 555 555 555 name4 09.10
table_deduplicated <- dedupe_wide(initial_table, cols_dedupe = paste0("tel_", 1:5),
cols_expand = "name")
table_deduplicated
#> tel_1....1 tel_1....2 tel_1....3 tel_1....4 name....1 name....2 name....3 nace
#> 1 111 222 444 666 name1 name2 name3 01.19
#> 2 555 NA NA NA name4 <NA> <NA> 09.10Please refer to a vignette for step-by-step explanation as well as information about algorithm used: Usage and Algorithm Explained