4 Summarising Data

Summarising data with R and the tidyverse is generally straightforward. A complex data summary can be reduced to a series of smaller tasks - this is thinking like a programmer!

Programming languages bear some resemblance to human languages, in that we can construct sentences using verbs and nouns. The nouns are the objects in our environment, and the verbs are the functions we apply to those objects.

Let’s look at the tidyverse family of functions by examining a few key verbs for data manipulation: arrange(), filter(), select(), group_by(), mutate(), and summarise().