Make a frequency table

A frequency table counts up the number of times each level of a categorical variable appears in the data.

We’ll make a frequency table using the msleep dataset that comes from tidyverse. msleep contains some data about how much different kinds of mammals sleep. Here’s what the first few rows of msleep look like.

msleep |> head()

# A tibble: 6 × 11
  name    genus vore  order conservation sleep_total sleep_rem sleep_cycle awake
  <chr>   <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>              <dbl>     <dbl>       <dbl> <dbl>
1 Cheetah Acin… carni Carn… lc                  12.1      NA        NA      11.9
2 Owl mo… Aotus omni  Prim… <NA>                17         1.8      NA       7  
3 Mounta… Aplo… herbi Rode… nt                  14.4       2.4      NA       9.6
4 Greate… Blar… omni  Sori… lc                  14.9       2.3       0.133   9.1
5 Cow     Bos   herbi Arti… domesticated         4         0.7       0.667  20  
6 Three-… Brad… herbi Pilo… <NA>                14.4       2.2       0.767   9.6
# ℹ 2 more variables: brainwt <dbl>, bodywt <dbl>

To make a frequency table for the variable vore, we take our data frame and pipe it into the tidyverse function count(). Inside the parentheses of count(), we name the column that we want to make the frequency table for.

msleep |>
  count(vore)

# A tibble: 5 × 2
  vore        n
  <chr>   <int>
1 carni      19
2 herbi      32
3 insecti     5
4 omni       20
5 <NA>        7