R: How to use summarize and do function together on grouped data

Question

In tidyverse, summarise can be used on grouped data with single valued functions. For example

mtcars %>% group_by(cyl) %>% summarise(max(cos(mpg)))

If the function is vector-valued then, if I am not wrong, it's recommended to use do. For example, the do command works for the vector valued function 'describe' from phych package:

 library(psych)
 mtcars %>% group_by(cyl) %>% do(describe(.$mpg))

How to apply both a single-valued and a vector-valued functions to grouped data at the same time? For example, how to apply both max(cos()) and describe() to mpg column, and have the output as one dataframe?

Answer 1

We can place the output of describe in a list within the summarise and then unnest

library(tidyverse)
mtcars %>% 
    group_by(cyl) %>%
    summarise(Cosmpg = max(cos(mpg)), list(describe(mpg))) %>%
    unnest
# A tibble: 3 x 15
#    cyl Cosmpg  vars     n  mean    sd median trimmed   mad   min   max range   skew kurtosis    se
#  <dbl>  <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>  <dbl>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>  <dbl>    <dbl> <dbl>
#1  4.00  0.743  1.00 11.0   26.7  4.51   26.0    26.4  6.52  21.4  33.9 12.5   0.259   -1.65  1.36 
#2  6.00  0.939  1.00  7.00  19.7  1.45   19.7    19.7  1.93  17.8  21.4  3.60 -0.158   -1.91  0.549
#3  8.00  0.989  1.00 14.0   15.1  2.56   15.2    15.2  1.56  10.4  19.2  8.80 -0.363   -0.566 0.684