How to replace NA with most recent non-NA by group? [duplicate]

As another base R solution, here is a poor man’s na.locf

fill_down <- function(v) {
    if (length(v) > 1) {
        keep <- c(TRUE, !is.na(v[-1]))
        v[keep][cumsum(keep)]
    } else v
}

To fill down by group, the approach is to use tapply() to split and apply to each group, and split<- to combine groups to the original geometry, as

fill_down_by_group <- function(v, grp) {
    ## original 'by hand':
    ##     split(v, grp) <- tapply(v, grp, fill_down)
    ##     v
    ## done by built-in function `ave()`
    ave(v, grp, FUN=fill_down)
}

To process multiple columns, one might

elts <- c("age", "birthplace")
df[elts] <- lapply(df[elts], fill_down_by_group, df$name)

Notes

1. I would be interested in seeing how a dplyr solution handles many columns, without hard-coding each? Answering my own question, I guess this is

   library(dplyr); library(tidyr)
   df %>% group_by(name) %>% fill_(elts)
   

2. A more efficient base solution when the groups are already ‘grouped’ (e.g., identical(grp, sort(grp))) is

   fill_down_by_grouped <- function(v, grp) {
       if (length(v) > 1) {
           keep <- !(duplicated(v) & is.na(v))
           v[keep][cumsum(keep)]
       } else v
   }
   

3. For me, fill_down() on a vector with about 10M elements takes ~225ms; fill_down_by_grouped() takes ~300ms independent of the number of groups; fill_down_by_group() scales with the number of groups; for 10000 groups ~2s, 10M groups about 36s