Visualisation is an important tool for insight generation, but it is rare that you get the data in exactly the right form you need. Often you'll need to create some new variables or summaries, or maybe you just want to rename the variables or reorder the observations in order to make the data a little easier to work with. You'll learn how to do all that (and more!) in this chapter, which will teach you how to transform your data using the dplyr package and a new dataset on flights departing New York City in 2013.
In this chapter we're going to focus on how to use the dplyr package, another core member of the tidyverse. We'll illustrate the key ideas using data from the nycflights13 package, and use ggplot2 to help us understand the data.
Take careful note of the conflicts message that's printed when you load the tidyverse. It tells you that dplyr overwrites some functions in base R. If you want to use the base version of these functions after loading dplyr, you'll need to use their full names: `stats::filter()` and `stats::lag()`.
To explore the basic data manipulation verbs of dplyr, we'll use `nycflights13::flights`. This data frame contains all `r format(nrow(nycflights13::flights), big.mark = ",")` flights that departed from New York City in 2013. The data comes from the US [Bureau of Transportation Statistics](http://www.transtats.bts.gov/DatabaseInfo.asp?DB_ID=120&Link=0), and is documented in `?flights`.
You might notice that this data frame prints a little differently from other data frames you might have used in the past: it only shows the first few rows and all the columns that fit on one screen. (To see the whole dataset, you can run `View(flights)` which will open the dataset in the RStudio viewer). It prints differently because it's a __tibble__. Tibbles are data frames, but slightly tweaked to work better in the tidyverse. For now, you don't need to worry about the differences; we'll come back to tibbles in more detail in [wrangle](#wrangle-intro).
These can all be used in conjunction with `group_by()` which changes the scope of each function from operating on the entire dataset to operating on it group-by-group. These six functions provide the verbs for a language of data manipulation.
Together these properties make it easy to chain together multiple simple steps to achieve a complex result. Let's dive in and see how these verbs work.
`filter()` allows you to subset observations based on their values. The first argument is the name of the data frame. The second and subsequent arguments are the expressions that filter the data frame. For example, we can select all flights on January 1st with:
When you run that line of code, dplyr executes the filtering operation and returns a new data frame. dplyr functions never modify their inputs, so if you want to save the result, you'll need to use the assignment operator, `<-`:
To use filtering effectively, you have to know how to select the observations that you want using the comparison operators. R provides the standard suite: `>`, `>=`, `<`, `<=`, `!=` (not equal), and `==` (equal).
When you're starting out with R, the easiest mistake to make is to use `=` instead of `==` when testing for equality. When this happens you'll get an informative error:
Computers use finite precision arithmetic (they obviously can't store an infinite number of digits!) so remember that every number you see is an approximation. Instead of relying on `==`, use `near()`:
Multiple arguments to `filter()` are combined with "and": every expression must be true in order for a row to be included in the output. For other types of combinations, you'll need to use Boolean operators yourself: `&` is "and", `|` is "or", and `!` is "not". Figure \@ref(fig:bool-ops) shows the complete set of Boolean operations.
```{r bool-ops, echo = FALSE, fig.cap = "Complete set of boolean operations. `x` is the left-hand circle, `y` is the right-hand circle, and the shaded region show which parts each operator selects."}
The order of operations doesn't work like English. You can't write `filter(flights, month == (11 | 12))`, which you might literally translate into "finds all flights that departed in November or December". Instead it finds all months that equal `11 | 12`, an expression that evaluates to `TRUE`. In a numeric context (like here), `TRUE` becomes one, so this finds all flights in January, not November or December. This is quite confusing!
A useful short-hand for this problem is `x %in% y`. This will select every row where `x` is one of the values in `y`. We could use it to rewrite the code above:
Sometimes you can simplify complicated subsetting by remembering De Morgan's law: `!(x & y)` is the same as `!x | !y`, and `!(x | y)` is the same as `!x & !y`. For example, if you wanted to find flights that weren't delayed (on arrival or departure) by more than two hours, you could use either of the following two filters:
Whenever you start using complicated, multipart expressions in `filter()`, consider making them explicit variables instead. That makes it much easier to check your work. You'll learn how to create new variables shortly.
One important feature of R that can make comparison tricky are missing values, or `NA`s ("not availables"). `NA` represents an unknown value so missing values are "contagious": almost any operation involving an unknown value will also be unknown.
`filter()` only includes rows where the condition is `TRUE`; it excludes both `FALSE` and `NA` values. If you want to preserve missing values, ask for them explicitly:
`arrange()` works similarly to `filter()` except that instead of selecting rows, it changes their order. It takes a data frame and a set of column names (or more complicated expressions) to order by. If you provide more than one column name, each additional column will be used to break ties in the values of preceding columns:
It's not uncommon to get datasets with hundreds or even thousands of variables. In this case, the first challenge is often narrowing in on the variables you're actually interested in. `select()` allows you to rapidly zoom in on a useful subset using operations based on the names of the variables.
`select()` can be used to rename variables, but it's rarely useful because it drops all of the variables not explicitly mentioned. Instead, use `rename()`, which is a variant of `select()` that keeps all the variables that aren't explicitly mentioned:
Another option is to use `select()` in conjunction with the `everything()` helper. This is useful if you have a handful of variables you'd like to move to the start of the data frame.
`mutate()` always adds new columns at the end of your dataset so we'll start by creating a narrower dataset so we can see the new variables. Remember that when you're in RStudio, the easiest way to see all the columns is `View()`.
There are many functions for creating new variables that you can use with `mutate()`. The key property is that the function must be vectorised: it must take a vector of values as input, return a vector with the same number of values as output. There's no way to list every possible function that you might use, but here's a selection of functions that are frequently useful:
`summarise()` is not terribly useful unless we pair it with `group_by()`. This changes the unit of analysis from the complete dataset to individual groups. Then, when you use the dplyr verbs on a grouped data frame they'll be automatically applied "by group". For example, if we applied exactly the same code to a data frame grouped by date, we get the average delay per date:
Together `group_by()` and `summarise()` provide one of the tools that you'll use most commonly when working with dplyr: grouped summaries. But before we go any further with this, we need to introduce a powerful new idea: the pipe.
Imagine that we want to explore the relationship between the distance and average delay for each location. Using what you know about dplyr, you might write code like this:
This code is a little frustrating to write because we have to give each intermediate data frame a name, even though we don't care about it. Naming things is hard, so this slows down our analysis.
This focuses on the transformations, not what's being transformed, which makes the code easier to read. You can read it as a series of imperative statements: group, then summarise, then filter. As suggested by this reading, a good way to pronounce `%>%` when reading code is "then".
Behind the scenes, `x %>% f(y)` turns into `f(x, y)`, and `x %>% f(y) %>% g(z)` turns into `g(f(x, y), z)` and so on. You can use the pipe to rewrite multiple operations in a way that you can read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. We'll use piping frequently from now on because it considerably improves the readability of code, and we'll come back to it in more detail in [pipes].
Working with the pipe is one of the key criteria for belonging to the tidyverse. The only exception is ggplot2: it was written before the pipe was discovered. Unfortunately, the next iteration of ggplot2, ggvis, which does use the pipe, isn't quite ready for prime time yet.
We get a lot of missing values! That's because aggregation functions obey the usual rule of missing values: if there's any missing value in the input, the output will be a missing value. Fortunately, all aggregation functions have an `na.rm` argument which removes the missing values prior to computation:
In this case, where missing values represent cancelled flights, we could also tackle the problem by first removing the cancelled flights. We'll save this dataset so we can reuse it in the next few examples.
Whenever you do any aggregation, it's always a good idea to include either a count (`n()`), or a count of non-missing values (`sum(!is.na(x))`). That way you can check that you're not drawing conclusions based on very small amounts of data. For example, let's look at the planes (identified by their tail number) that have the highest average delays:
Not surprisingly, there is much greater variation in the average delay when there are few flights. The shape of this plot is very characteristic: whenever you plot a mean (or other summary) vs. group size, you'll see that the variation decreases as the sample size increases.
When looking at this sort of plot, it's often useful to filter out the groups with the smallest numbers of observations, so you can see more of the pattern and less of the extreme variation in the smallest groups. This is what the following code does, as well as showing you a handy pattern for integrating ggplot2 into dplyr flows. It's a bit painful that you have to switch from `%>%` to `+`, but once you get the hang of it, it's quite convenient.
RStudio tip: a useful keyboard shortcut is Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P. This resends the previously sent chunk from the editor to the console. This is very convenient when you're (e.g.) exploring the value of `n` in the example above. You send the whole block once with Cmd/Ctrl + Enter, then you modify the value of `n` and press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P to resend the complete block.
There's another common variation of this type of pattern. Let's look at how the average performance of batters in baseball is related to the number of times they're at bat. Here I use data from the __Lahman__ package to compute the batting average (number of hits / number of attempts) of every major league baseball player.
When I plot the skill of the batter (measured by the batting average, `ba`) against the number of opportunities to hit the ball (measured by at bat, `ab`), you see two patterns:
This also has important implications for ranking. If you naively sort on `desc(ba)`, the people with the best batting averages are clearly lucky, not skilled:
You can find a good explanation of this problem at <http://varianceexplained.org/r/empirical_bayes_baseball/> and <http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html>.
Be careful when progressively rolling up summaries: it's OK for sums and counts, but you need to think about weighting means and variances, and it's not possible to do it exactly for rank-based statistics like the median. In other words, the sum of groupwise sums is the overall sum, but the median of groupwise medians is not the overall median.
A grouped filter is a grouped mutate followed by an ungrouped filter. I generally avoid them except for quick and dirty manipulations: otherwise it's hard to check that you've done the manipulation correctly.
Functions that work most naturally in grouped mutates and filters are known as window functions (vs. the summary functions used for summaries). You can learn more about useful window functions in the corresponding vignette: `vignette("window-functions")`.
