Remove Bottom N Rows from Data Frame in R (2 Examples)

In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to drop the last N rows of a data frame in the R programming language.

Table of contents:

Let’s dig in.

Creation of Exemplifying Data

First and foremost, let’s create some example data:

data <- data.frame(x1 = LETTERS[1:10],    # Create example data frame
                   x2 = 1:10,
                   x3 = 20:11)
data                                      # Print example data frame

As you can see based on Table 1, our exemplifying data is a data frame containing ten rows and three columns.

Example 1: Delete Bottom N Rows of Data Frame Using head() Function

In this section, I’ll illustrate how to use the head function to remove the bottom 3 rows of our data frame.

Within the head function, we simply have to specify the number of rows that we want to delete with a minus sign in front.

Consider the R cod below:

data_new1 <- head(data, - 3)              # Apply head function
data_new1                                 # Print data without bottom rows

After running the previous R programming code the data frame shown in Table 2 has been created. As you can see, our output data frame has only seven rows, i.e. three rows have been removed.

Example 2: Delete Bottom N Rows of Data Frame Using slice() & n() Functions of dplyr Package

Example 2 explains how to remove the last N rows of a data frame using the dplyr package.

To be able to use the functions of the dplyr package, we first need to install and load dplyr:

install.packages("dplyr")                 # Install dplyr package
library("dplyr")                          # Load dplyr package

Now, we can apply the slice and n function to delete the last N rows of our data frame.

Similar to the previous example, we have to specify the number of rows that we want to delete with a minus sign in front:

data_new2 <- slice(data, 1:(n() - 3))     # Apply slice & n functions
data_new2                                 # Print data without bottom rows

By running the previous R programming syntax we have created Table 3, i.e. a data frame without the last three lines.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Do you want to know more about data manipulation and data frames in R? Then I can recommend watching the following video of my YouTube channel. In the video, I show the contents of this article in R:

In addition, you might read some of the other tutorials of my homepage.

• Repeat Rows of Data Frame N Times
• Extract First N Rows of Data Frame
• Remove Rows with NA in R
• Create Data Frame with n Rows & m Columns
• Conditionally Remove Row from Data Frame in R
• Remove Empty Rows of Data Frame
• All R Programming Examples

This tutorial has shown how to get rid of the bottom N rows of a data frame in R. If you have any additional questions, let me know in the comments.