Practical Data Wrangling

Shaping and structuring data

Preparing data for its end use often requires both structuring and organizing the data in the correct manner. 

To illustrate this, suppose you have a hierarchical dataset of city populations, as shown in Figure 01:

Figure 01: Hierarchical structure of the population of cities

If the goal is to create a histogram of city populations, the previous data format would be hard to work with. Not only is the information of the city populations nested within the data structure, but it is nested to varying degrees of depth. For the purposes of creating a histogram, it is better to represent the data as a list of numbers, ...