5 Data engineering and data shaping

This chapter covers

  • Becoming comfortable with applying data transforms
  • Starting with important data manipulation packages including data.table and dplyr
  • Learning to control the layout of your data

This chapter will show you how to use R to organize or wrangle data into a shape useful for analysis. Data shaping is a set of steps you have to take if your data is not found all in one table or in an arrangement ready for analysis.

Figure 5.1 is the mental model for this chapter: working with data. Previous chapters have assumed the data is in a ready-to-go form, or we have pre-prepared the data to be in such a form for you. This chapter will prepare you to take these steps yourself. The basic concept of data ...

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