I have a large tab-separated data table with thousands of rows and dozens of columns and it has missing data marked as "na". For example,
na 0.93 na 0 na 0.51
1 1 na 1 na 1
1 1 na 0.97 na 1
0.92 1 na 1 0.01 0.34
I would like to calculate the mean of each column, but making sure that the missing data are ignored in the calculation. For example, the mean of column 1 should be 0.97. I believe I could use awk
but I am not sure how to construct the command to do this for all columns and account for missing data.
All I know how to do is to calculate the mean of a single column but it treats the missing data as 0 rather than leaving it out of the calculation.
awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum/NR}' filename
This is obscure, but works for your example
awk '{for(i=1; i<=NF; i++){sum[i] += $i; if($i != "na"){count[i]+=1}}} END {for(i=1; i<=NF; i++){if(count[i]!=0){v = sum[i]/count[i]}else{v = 0}; if(i<NF){printf "%f\t",v}else{print v}}}' input.txt
EDIT:
Here is how it works:
awk '{for(i=1; i<=NF; i++){ #for each column
sum[i] += $i; #add the sum to the "sum" array
if($i != "na"){ #if value is not "na"
count[i]+=1} #increment the column "count"
} #endif
} #endfor
END { #at the end
for(i=1; i<=NF; i++){ #for each column
if(count[i]!=0){ #if the column count is not 0
v = sum[i]/count[i] #then calculate the column mean (here represented with "v")
}else{ #else (if column count is 0)
v = 0 #then let mean be 0 (note: you can set this to be "na")
}; #endif col count is not 0
if(i<NF){ #if the column is before the last column
printf "%f\t",v #print mean + TAB
}else{ #else (if it is the last column)
print v} #print mean + NEWLINE
}; #endif
}' input.txt #endfor (note: input.txt is the input file)
```
A possible solution:
awk -F"\t" '{for(i=1; i <= NF; i++)
{if($i == $i+0){sum[i]+=$i; denom[i] += 1;}}}
END{for(i=1; i<= NF; i++){line=line""sum[i]/(denom[i]?denom[i]:1)FS}
print line}' inputFile
The output for the given data:
0.973333 0.9825 0 0.7425 0.01 0.7125
Note that the third column contains only "na" and the output is 0
. If you want the output to be na
, then change the END{...}
-block to:
END{for(i=1; i<= NF; i++){line=line""(denom[i] ? sum[i]/denom[i]:"na")FS}
print line}'