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

Logistical overview


All of the activities in this chapter will be conducted in a single R script. R scripts are files with the .R extension which are analogous to Python scripts. This chapter will make use of the RStudio IDE rather than a text editor for editing code, so you will be able to create this script from within RStudio (I will explain how to do this later in the chapter).

The R script containing the code for this chapter is called r_intro.R and is available in the code folder of the external resources. All external resources are available at the following link: https://goo.gl/8S58ra.

Data

The dataset for Chapter 6 will be the artificial_roads_by_region.csv dataset that was introduced in Chapter 4. It can be downloaded from the data folder of the external resources.

Directory structure

To follow along with the exercises in Chapter 6Cleaning Numerical Data - An Introduction to R and RStudio, create a project folder called ch6. The ch6 folder should have a folder called data, which should...