In this tutorial, we will cover how to fix the error in selecting unused arguments in R. Error looks like below in R.
Error in select(., Species, Sepal.Length) : unused arguments (Species, Sepal.Length)
This error occurs when we try to use the select() function in R’s dplyr package, but we also have the some other R package which also has select() function. For example MASS package also has select() function. Since R has already loaded select() function from the MASS package which causes an error to appear.
How to reproduce the error
To recreate the error, follow the example below :
library(dplyr)
library(MASS)
iris %>%
select(Species, Sepal.Length) %>%
group_by(Species) %>%
summarize(mean_sepalLength = mean(Sepal.Length))
Error in select(., Species, Sepal.Length) : unused arguments (Species, Sepal.Length)
How to fix the error
By using this code dplyr::select( ) we have made sure select( ) function gets loaded from dplyr package instead of MASS package.
iris %>%
dplyr::select(Species, Sepal.Length) %>%
group_by(Species) %>%
summarize(mean_sepalLength = mean(Sepal.Length))
# A tibble: 3 × 2
Species mean_sepalLength
1 setosa 5.01
2 versicolor 5.94
3 virginica 6.59
In the code above we used iris dataframe and calculated the average value of Sepal.Length variable by different types of Species.
Let’s take one more example to understand it better. Here we are using mtcars dataframe. mpg refers to Miles/(US) gallon and cyl refers to Number of cylinders.
library(dplyr)
library(MASS)
mtcars %>%
select(cyl, mpg) %>%
group_by(cyl) %>%
summarize(mean_mpg = mean(mpg))
Error in select(., cyl, mpg) : unused arguments (cyl, mpg)
Similar to the previous example, we have used a double colon (::) to ask R to consider the select function from the dplyr package.
mtcars %>%
dplyr::select(cyl, mpg) %>%
group_by(cyl) %>%
summarize(mean_mpg = mean(mpg))
# A tibble: 3 × 2
cyl mean_mpg
1 4 26.7
2 6 19.7
3 8 15.1
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