Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By : Allan Visochek
Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By: Allan Visochek

Overview of this book

Around 80% of time in data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data for analysis. This is, however, an important task, and is a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow, including visualization, analysis and reporting. Python and R are considered a popular choice of tool for data analysis, and have packages that can be best used to manipulate different kinds of data, as per your requirements. This book will show you the different data wrangling techniques, and how you can leverage the power of Python and R packages to implement them. You’ll start by understanding the data wrangling process and get a solid foundation to work with different types of data. You’ll work with different data structures and acquire and parse data from various locations. You’ll also see how to reshape the layout of data and manipulate, summarize, and join data sets. Finally, we conclude with a quick primer on accessing and processing data from databases, conducting data exploration, and storing and retrieving data quickly using databases. The book includes practical examples on each of these points using simple and real-world data sets to give you an easier understanding. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of all the data wrangling concepts and how to implement them in the best possible way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 6. Cleaning Numerical Data - An Introduction to R and RStudio

The philosophy behind the previous chapters leading up to this point has been to take a generalized programming approach to data wrangling. A good grasp of the underlying programming techniques involved in manipulating data gives you the ability to tackle non-standard problems in data wrangling when they are encountered.

However, a large number of tasks can be more concisely and elegantly expressed with a language specific to data manipulation. In many cases, the R environment and programming language can allow you to express more with less. On top of that, several packages built on top of R can make the language even more concise and expressive. In this chapter and the next, I will show you how R can be used to take a more formulated approach to data wrangling. This chapter will be an introduction to R with the application of numerical data cleaning. This chapter will include the following sections:

  • Logistical overview
  • Introducing...