Match Data Frames Using Greedy K-Nearest Neighbors

This function matches rows from a smaller dataframe to rows in a larger dataframe based on specified numerical variables. The matching is performed using a greedy algorithm that maximizes uniqueness in the matched subset.

match_data_frames(df1, df2, match_vars)

Arguments

df1

A dataframe that is the smaller set to match from.

df2

A dataframe that is the larger set to match to.

match_vars

A character vector of column names to match on. These columns should be numerical or convertible to numerical.

Value

A dataframe containing the rows from df2 that are matched to each row in df1. The returned dataframe will contain only the columns that are common to both input dataframes.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
df1 <- data.frame(age_BL = c(30, 40, 50), commonSex = c("M", "F", "M"), MOCA = c(25, 28, 27))
df2 <- data.frame(age_BL = c(31, 39, 51, 60), commonSex = c("M", "F", "F", "M"), MOCA = c(26, 27, 29, 28))
matched_df <- match_data_frames(df1, df2, c("age_BL", "commonSex", "MOCA"))
} # }