Tidy Modeling with R

Chapter 2. A Tidyverse Primer

What is the tidyverse, and where does the tidymodels framework fit in? The tidyverse is a collection of R packages for data analysis that are developed with common ideas and norms. From Wickham et al. (2019):

At a high level, the tidyverse is a language for solving data science challenges with R code. Its primary goal is to facilitate a conversation between a human and a computer about data. Less abstractly, the tidyverse is a collection of R packages that share a high-level design philosophy and low-level grammar and data structures, so that learning one package makes it easier to learn the next.

In this chapter, we briefly discuss important principles of the tidyverse design philosophy and how they apply in the context of modeling software that is easy to use properly and supports good statistical practice, like we outlined in Chapter 1. The next chapter covers modeling conventions from the core R language. Together, you can use these discussions to understand the relationships between the tidyverse, tidymodels, and the core or base R language. Both tidymodels and the tidyverse build on the R language, and tidymodels applies tidyverse principles to building models.

Tidyverse Principles

The full set of strategies and tactics for writing R code in the tidyverse style can be found at the tidyverse website. Here we briefly describe several of the general tidyverse design principles, their motivation, and how we think about modeling as an application ...