I am currently working with a data frame in R that is a "horizontal" structure. Here is a sample of the data being referred to:
head(all[,1:4])
Variable Channel TIMEPERIOD Volume
V1 Retail 41640 50
V1 Retail 41671 60
V1 Retail 41699 40
V1 Retail 41730 30
V1 Retail 41760 30
V1 Retail 41791 40
In the above data, the 'Volume' variable is the first of about 50 additional variables/columns in the data frame. My expected output would be:
head(all[,1:5])
Variable Channel TIMEPERIOD Variable Value
V1 Retail 41640 Volume 50
V1 Retail 41671 Volume 60
V1 Retail 41699 Volume 40
V1 Retail 41730 Volume 30
V1 Retail 41760 Volume 30
V1 Retail 41791 Volume 40
Is there a quicker way of doing this transformation than inserting a blank variable column and going through the data frame manually column by column? I've done this in the past with:
# Create subset of specific columns
volume <- subset(nielsen_retail, select = c("X__1", "X__2",
"X__3"))
# Rename columns
colnames(volume) <- c("prod_name", "time_period", "value")
# Insert channel column
volume$channel <- "retail"
# Insert variable column
volume$variable <- "sales_volume"
# Reorder columns
volume <- volume[ , c("prod_name","time_period",
"channel","variable", "value")]
As you can see, this results in a very manual and time-consuming process in a large data frame. Thanks in advance for your help!
