With all of the excitement surrounding cdata style control table based data transforms (the cdata ideas being named as the “replacements” for tidyr‘s current methodology, by the tidyr authors themselves!) I thought I would take a moment to describe how they work.
From https://twitter.com/sharon000/status/1107771331012108288: From https://tidyr.tidyverse.org/dev/articles/pivot.html (text by Hadley Wickham): For some time, it’s been obvious that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design of spread() and gather(). Many people don’t find the names intuitive and find it hard to remember which direction corresponds to spreading and which to gathering. It […]
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 […]
We have been writing a lot on higher-order data transforms lately: Coordinatized Data: A Fluid Data Specification Data Wrangling at Scale Fluid Data Big Data Transforms. What I want to do now is "write a bit more, so I finally feel I have been concise."
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 […]
Authors: John Mount and Nina Zumel Introduction In teaching thinking in terms of coordinatized data we find the hardest operations to teach are joins and pivot. One thing we commented on is that moving data values into columns, or into a “thin” or entity/attribute/value form (often called “un-pivoting”, “stacking”, “melting” […]
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 […]