7.5 Resources
This section provides some pointers to additional resources on tidy data.
7.5.1 Help on tidying data
Read Chapter 12: Tidy data in the r4ds textbook (Wickham & Grolemund, 2017).
For additional details on the tidyr package (Wickham & Girlich, 2024):
study the
vignette("tidy-data")andvignette("pivot"), as well as the documentations of?spread,?gather,?seperate,?unite, etc.;study https://tidyr.tidyverse.org. and its examples, as well as the discussions at https://community.rstudio.com/tags/tidyr;
study the Posit cheatsheet on data tidying with the tidyr package:
Figure 7.3: The Posit cheatsheet on data tidying with tidyr functions.
7.5.2 Miscellaneous
For background information on the notion of tidy data, see the following paper by Hadley Wickham (2014b):
- Wickham, H. (2014). Tidy data. Journal of Statistical Software, 59(10), 1–23. doi: 10.18637/jss.v059.i10 (available at https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v059i10)
For a critical view, see the following blog post:
- What is “tidy data”? (by John Mount)
The section Related work on https://tidyr.tidyverse.org provides some historical notes (e.g., on the relation between tidyr and reshape), pointers on terminology between different frameworks (e.g., SQL), and recommends the following papers:
Wrangler: Interactive visual specification of data transformation scripts
An interactive framework for data cleaning (Potter’s wheel)
A powerful alternative framework to data cleaning and wrangling is provided by the data.table package (Barrett et al., 2024).
- See https://rdatatable.gitlab.io/data.table/ and the documentation to get started.
Check out Wikipedia: Tidy data for additional details and links.
For animated images of common data transformations (e.g., by using spread() and gather()), see
7.5.3 Outlook
The commands of tidyr are first steps, rather than the ultimate solution to data wrangling. This area is currently under active development and only the future will show which framework will ultimately be adopted. And rather than despairing about technological changes, we all should feel happy — as in the Chinese proverb — to live in interesting times…
[07_tidy.Rmd updated on 2024-12-20 by hn.]