Chapter 2. Tidying, manipulating, and plotting data with the tidyverse

I’m really excited to start teaching machine learning to you. But before we dive into that, I want to teach you some skills that are going to make your learning experience simpler and more effective. These skills will also improve your general data science and R programming skills.

Imagine that I asked you to build me a car (a typical request between friends). You could go old-fashioned: you could purchase the metal, glass, and other components; hand-cut all the pieces; hammer them into shape; and rivet them together. The car might look beautiful and work perfectly, but it would take a very long time to build, and it would be hard for you to remember exactly what you did if you had to make another one.

Instead, you could take a modern approach and use robotic arms in your factory. You could program them to cut and bend the pieces into predefined shapes and assemble the pieces for you. In this scenario, building a car would be much faster and simpler for you, and it would be easy for you to reproduce the same process in the future.

2.1. What is the tidyverse, and what is tidy data?

2.2. Loading the tidyverse

2.3. What the tibble package is and what it does

2.4. What the dplyr package is and what it does

2.5. What the ggplot2 package is and what it does

2.6. What the tidyr package is and what it does

2.7. What the purrr package is and what it does

Summary

Solutions to exercises