When working with big data with R (say, using Spark and sparklyr) we have found it very convenient to keep data handles in a neat list or data_frame. Please read on for our handy hints on keeping your data handles neat. When using R to work over a big data system (such as Spark) much … Continue reading Managing Spark data handles in R
Introduction Beginning R users often come to the false impression that the popular packages dplyr and tidyr are both all of R and sui generis inventions (in that they might be unprecedented and there might no other reasonable way to get the same effects in R). These packages and their conventions are high-value, but they … Continue reading dplyr in Context
Authors: John Mount and Nina Zumel. Introduction It has been our experience when teaching the data wrangling part of data science that students often have difficulty understanding the conversion to and from row-oriented and column-oriented data formats (what is commonly called pivoting and un-pivoting). Boris Artzybasheff illustration Real trust and understanding of this concept doesn’t … Continue reading Coordinatized Data: A Fluid Data Specification
I saw Simon Jackson’s recent blog post regarding ordering categories within facets. He proposed a way of dealing with the problem of ordering variables shared across facets within facets. This problem becomes apparent in text analysis where words are shared … Continue reading →
Data with repeated measures often come to us in the "wide" format, as shown below for the HELP data set we use in our book. Here we show just an ID, the CESD depression measure from four follow-up assessments, plus the baseline CESD. Obs ID CESD...
