R in Action, Second Edition

Chapter 5. Advanced data management

This chapter covers

• Mathematical and statistical functions
• Character functions
• Looping and conditional execution
• User-written functions
• Ways to aggregate and reshape data

In chapter 4, we reviewed the basic techniques used for managing datasets in R. In this chapter, we’ll focus on advanced topics. The chapter is divided into three basic parts. In the first part, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of R’s many functions for mathematical, statistical, and character manipulation. To give this section relevance, we begin with a data-management problem that can be solved using these functions. After covering the functions themselves, we’ll look at one possible solution to the data-management problem.

Next, we ...