Remove an entire column from a data.frame in R?

Question

Does anyone know how to remove an entire column from a data.frame in R? For example if I am given this data.frame: > head(data) chr genome region 1 chr1 hg19_refGene CDS 2 chr1 hg19_refGene exon 3 chr1 hg19_refGene CDS 4 chr1 hg19_refGene exon 5 chr1 hg19_refGene CDS 6 chr1 hg19_refGene exonand I want to remove the 2nd column.

Answer 1

This can be done simply in base R using the column number (2), or the column name ('genome'):

data[,-2] # This takes the dataset, 'data', keeps all rows (i.e., nothing before the comma),

# and removes the second column

data[,-c('genome')] # Similarly, this takes the dataset, 'data', keeps all rows (i.e., nothing before the

# comma), and removes the column named 'genome'

Similary, using dyplr, you can use the select() function. This function selects specified variables from a data frame. To remove a variable, you simply put a minus sign in front of it.

data %>% select(-genome)