6. Tidy Data
6.1 Introduction
As mentioned in Chapter 4, Hadley Wickham,1 one of the more prominent members of the R community, introduced the concept of tidy data in a paper in the Journal of Statistical Software.2 Tidy data is a framework to structure data sets so they can be easily analyzed and visualized. It can be thought of as a goal one should aim for when cleaning data. Once you understand what tidy data is, that knowledge will make your data analysis, visualization, and collection much easier.
1. Hadley Wickham: http://hadley.nz/
2. Tidy data paper: http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf
What is tidy data? Hadley Wickham’s paper defines it as meeting the following criteria:
■ Each row is an observation.
■ Each column is a variable. ...
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