John Mount, Nina Zumel; Win-Vector LLC 2019-04-27 In this note we will use five real life examples to demonstrate data layout transforms using the cdata R package. The examples for this note are all demo-examples from tidyr/demo/, and are mostly based on questions posted to StackOverflow. They represent a good cross-section of data layout problems, … Continue reading Data Layout Exercises
Category: Exciting Techniques
Operator Notation for Data Transforms
As of cdata version 1.0.8 cdata implements an operator notation for data transform.
The idea is simple, yet powerful.
First let’s start with some data.
d <- wrapr::build_frame(
"id", "measure", "value" |
1…
“If You Were an R Function, What Function Would You Be?”
We’ve been getting some good uptake on our piping in R article announcement. The article is necessarily a bit technical. But one of its key points comes from the observation that piping into names is a special opportunity to give general objects the following personality quiz: “If you were an R function, what function would … Continue reading “If You Were an R Function, What Function Would You Be?”
Query Generation in R
R users have been enjoying the benefits of SQL query generators for quite some time, most notably using the dbplyr package. I would like to talk about some features of our own rquery query generator, concentrating on derived result re-use. Introduction SQL represents value use by nesting. To use a query result within another query … Continue reading Query Generation in R
cdata Control Table Keys
In our cdata R package and training materials we emphasize the record-oriented thinking and how to design a transform control table. We now have an additional exciting new feature: control table keys. The user can now control which columns of a cdata control table are the keys, including now using composite keys (that is keys … Continue reading cdata Control Table Keys
Function Objects and Pipelines in R
Composing functions and sequencing operations are core programming concepts. Some notable realizations of sequencing or pipelining operations include: Unix’s |-pipe CMS Pipelines. F#‘s forward pipe operator |>. Haskel’s Data.Function & operator. The R magrittr forward pipe. Scikit-learn‘s sklearn.pipeline.Pipeline. The idea is: many important calculations can be considered as a sequence of transforms applied to a … Continue reading Function Objects and Pipelines in R
Fully General Record Transforms with cdata
One of the design goals of the cdata R package is that very powerful and arbitrary record transforms should be convenient and take only one or two steps. In fact it is the goal to take just about any record shape to any other in two steps: first convert to row-records, then re-block the data … Continue reading Fully General Record Transforms with cdata
Introducing RcppDynProg
RcppDynProg is a new Rcpp based R package that implements simple, but powerful, table-based dynamic programming. This package can be used to optimally solve the minimum cost partition into intervals problem (described below) and is useful in building piecewise estimates of functions (shown in this note). The abstract problem The primary problem RcppDynProg::solve_dynamic_program() is designed … Continue reading Introducing RcppDynProg
vtreat Variable Importance
vtreat‘s purpose is to produce pure numeric R data.frames that are ready for supervised predictive modeling (predicting a value from other values). By ready we mean: a purely numeric data frame with no missing values and a reasonable number of columns (missing-values re-encoded with indicators, and high-degree categorical re-encode by effects codes or impact codes). … Continue reading vtreat Variable Importance
Reusable Pipelines in R
Pipelines in R are popular, the most popular one being magrittr as used by dplyr. This note will discuss the advanced re-usable piping systems: rquery/rqdatatable operator trees and wrapr function object pipelines. In each case we have a set of objects designed to extract extra power from the wrapr dot-arrow pipe %.>%. Piping Piping is … Continue reading Reusable Pipelines in R
Sharing Modeling Pipelines in R
Reusable modeling pipelines are a practical idea that gets re-developed many times in many contexts. wrapr supplies a particularly powerful pipeline notation, and a pipe-stage re-use system (notes here). We will demonstrate this with the vtreat data preparation system. Our example task is to fit a model on some arbitrary data. Our model will try … Continue reading Sharing Modeling Pipelines in R