Pivoting

Cute #rstats monster art by the amazing Allison Horst. knitr::include_graphics("gatherspread.jpeg") I have been using gather() and spread() a lot lately. I’m on the tidy data train; long data is essential for ggplot etc, but sometimes you want to do calculations row wise, which is kinda complicated. For example, this week Matilda and I were working with her language/locomotion data and we were looking at the number of action-directed, affirmative, and descriptive responses that parents make to their infants.

more wrangling tips

It is definitely true that it takes much longer to get your data ready for analysis than it does to actually analyse it. Apparently up to 80% of the data analysis time is spent wrangling data (and cursing and swearing). Did you know up to 80% of data analysis is spent on the process of cleaning and preparing data? - cf. Wickham, 2014 and Dasu and Johnson, 2003 So here is an excellent approach to data wrangling in #rstats https://t.