6.9 None-tidy data

Before we continue on to other topics, it’s worth talking briefly about non-tidy data. Earlier in the chapter, I used the pejorative term “messy” to refer to non-tidy data. That’s an oversimplification: there are lots of useful and well-founded data structures that are not tidy data. There are two main reasons to use other data structures:

• Alternative representations may have substantial performance or space advantages.

• Specialised fields have evolved their own conventions for storing data that may be quite different to the conventions of tidy data.

Either of these reasons means you’ll need something other than a tibble (or data frame). If your data does fit naturally into a rectangular structure composed of observations and variables, I think tidy data should be your default choice. But there are good reasons to use other structures; tidy data is not the only way. If you’d like to learn more about non-tidy data, I’d highly recommend this thoughtful blog post by Jeff Leek: http://simplystatistics.org/2016/02/17/non-tidy-data/