Aggregation

Aggregation is a data analysis operation which combines the data of similar observations.

Example

The table below shows data for three observations.

Person	Gender	Height
Bob	Male	6 feet
Carmen	Female	5 feet
Fred	Male	6 feet

The table below has been created from the table above by aggregating by gender. It can be thought of as either a summary of the table above, or, a new data set with a new definition of the observation (i.e., gender rather than person). In this example, the mathematical function that has been used to aggregate the numeric data is the mean. However, other functions are appropriate (e.g., maximum, sum).

Gender	Average Height
Male	6 feet
Female	5 feet

Related R functions

aggregate