R in Action, Third Edition

5 Advanced data management

This chapter covers

• Using mathematical and statistical functions
• Utilizing character functions
• Looping and conditional execution
• Writing your own functions
• Aggregating and reshaping data

In chapter 3, 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’ll ...