Look up value from one dataframe and find percent of values in another dataframe that are less than that

Question

Is there a one-liner that can accomplish this same thing? Essentially I have two dataframes: one that has my raw data (data), and one that has values that I want to lookup (lookup). I want to find the percent of values in data (by 2 factors, Site and variable) that are less than the lookup value for those same 2 factors.

I'd love to just be able add the result to the lookup dataframe as a column, instead of creating two new objects.

combine <- merge(data, lookup, by = c("Site", "variable"), allow.cartesian = TRUE)
test <- ddply(combine, .(Site, variable), summarize, percent = sum(data.values < lookup.value) / length(data.values))

Any advice is appreciated!

Answer 1

If you want to encapsulate the ddply logic, you can use the lapply(split(data, data[ , c("Site", "variable") ], function)-approach. I'm assuming that lookup only has one "value" for each combination of "Site" and "variable". Something like:

lapply( split(data, data[ , c("Site", "variable") ]), 
       function(d) { percent= 100*sum(d$value)/ lookup[
                                   lookup$Site==d$Site[1] lookup$variable==d$variable[1] ,
                                       "value"]}
       )

Another approach (only successful if the factor levels in both dataframes match) would be to use the quotient of two tapply-(matrix) results from each dataframes:

 percent= 100*tapply( data$value, data[ , c("Site", "variable")] , sum, na.rm=TRUE)/
 tapply( lookup$value, lookup[ , c("Site", "variable")] , sum, na.rm=TRUE)