Getting Distinct Rows In R

Rob J. Hyndman shows four different techniques (one “classic” and three tidyverse) for getting a distinct subset of a data set in R:

So that looks much better — clean, short, and easy to understand. But is it fast? Rather than grabbing the first lines of each group, it has to go searching for duplicates. But avoiding grouping and ungrouping must save some time.

So I ran some microbenchmark timings:

Click through for techniques and timings.  I’m not surprised that the “classic” method won out in terms of time, but for explanatory value, I’d definitely prefer trying to explain the tidyverse distinct version.  H/T R-Bloggers