Data Formatting and Reshaping in R

May 15, 2013, 3121 Snedecor

Adam Loy, aloy@iastate.edu.
Karsten Maurer, karstenm@iastate.edu.
Susan Vander Plas, skoons@iastate.edu.

This workshop is designed to help you with formatting and reshaping data based on the R packages plyr and reshape. The course will be data centric, with lots of different data sets that illustrate examples of the different techniques used for different problems.

The course will be a mix of instruction and follow-up exercises. It will be held in a computer lab but you are encouraged to bring your own laptops, with software already loaded. A list of software will be available at this site several days prior to the workshop.

Price:

$60 covers the whole day for students of Iowa State University, for other affiliates with Iowa State the fee is $90, to be paid by check (make check payable to Iowa State University) or cash with Marlene Tjernagel (1121G Snedecor)

Please contact Heike Hofmann (hofmann@iastate.edu) for fees in case you are not affiliated with the university.

Lectures and timetable

Date	Notes	Lecture and Resources

09:00 – 09:15	Setting Up	This will make sure that everybody's system is up and running 00-setup.R
09:15 – 10:15	Reading Files	Excel files vs text, data organization 01-files.R, gasprices.csv, gasprices.xls, midwest.csv, midwest.xls, midwest.xlsx
10:15 – 10:30	coffee break
10:30 – 12:00	Reshaping	the reshapeGUI, reshaping with melt and cast 02-reshaping.R, data sets
12:00 – 01:00	lunch break
01:00 – 02:15	Intro to ddply	for-loops, intro to ddply, summarize 03-intro-ddply.R
02:15 – 03:45	More ddply: an example	transform, Baby names, plyr variations 04-ddply.R, baby-names.csv
03:45 – 04:00	coffee break
04:00 – 04:45	Intro to data.table	data.table 05-data_table.R, corn.csv, crime.rda
04:45 – 05:00	Feedback	We very much appreciate any feedback you can give us. You can find a form here: survey.

Learning outcomes

After the end of the this one course, we expect you to be able to do the following:

Read data into R, know about different file formats
Know how to write for loops, as well as how to avoid them :).
Investigate and work with different types of objects
Reshape data fluently between different formats.
Working with ddply and its variations to get summary statistics from objects.

Getting Ready on your own machine

You can bring your own laptop and work on it, if you like to. In order to keep up with everybody else, we're asking that you start installing the following pieces of software ahead of coming to the workshop:

Install R version 3.0 (from www.r-project.org)

Once R is installed, start the application by double-clicking the icon. Copy and paste the following commands into the R Console Window:

install.packages("ggplot2", dependencies=TRUE)
# installs a few other packages as well
install.packages("MASS")
install.packages("gdata")
install.packages("foreign")
install.packages("reshapeGUI")
install.packages("data.table")

Data Formatting and Reshaping in R

Price:

Lectures and timetable

Learning outcomes

Getting Ready on your own machine

Useful links