Courtesy

This powerpoint file summarize the

Introduction to dplyr from
https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/dplyr
/vignettes/introduction.html where shows
step by step learning on dplyr package which
is very useful for manipulating data
By compiling the mentioned webpage to
powerpoint, the material is easier to introduce
in the lecture
When working with data you must
Figure out what you want to do
Describe those tasks in the form of a
computer program
Execute the program
 The dplyr package makes these steps
fast and easy
By constraining your options, it simplifies how
you can think about common data
manipulation tasks
It provides simple verbs, functions that
correspond to the most common data
manipulation tasks, to help you translate
those thoughts into code.
It uses efficient data storage backends, so you
spend less time waiting for the computer.
 dplyrs basic set of tools
Databases
Besides in-memory data frames, dplyr also connects to
out-of-memory, remote databases. And by translating your
R code into the appropriate SQL, it allows you to work with
both types of data using the same set of tools.
benchmark-baseball
see how dplyr compares to other tools for data
manipulation on a realistic use case.
window-functions
a window function is a variation on an aggregation
function. Where an aggregate function uses n inputs to
produce 1 output, a window function uses n inputs to
produce n outputs.
 Data: nycflights13
To explore the basic data manipulation verbs
of dplyr, well start with the built in
nycflights13 data frame. This dataset contains
all 336776 flights that departed from New
York City in 2013. The data comes from the US
Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and is
documented in ?nycflights13
 Prepare your nycflights13 data
install.packages("nycflights13")
library(nycflights13)
dim(flights)
head(flights)
 Large data: tbl_df
dplyr can work with data frames as is, but if
youre dealing with large data, its worthwhile
to convert them to a tbl_df: this is a wrapper
around a data frame that wont accidentally
print a lot of data to the screen.
SINGLE TABLE VERBS
 Single table verbs
Dplyr aims to provide a function for each basic
verb of data manipulation:
filter() (and slice())
arrange()
select() (and rename())
distinct()
mutate() (and transmute())
summarise()
sample_n() and sample_frac()
If youve used plyr before, many of these will be
familiar.
 Filter rows with filter()
filter() allows you to select a subset of rows in
a data frame. 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:
 Filter rows with filter()
filter(flights, month == 1, day == 1)

This is equivalent to the more verbose code in base R:

flights[flights$month == 1 & flights$day == 1, ]
 filter() vs. subset()
filter() works similarly to subset() except that
you can give it any number of filtering
conditions, which are joined together with &
(not && which is easy to do accidentally!). You
can also use other boolean operators:
filter(flights, month == 1 | month == 2)
 slices()
To select rows by position, use slice():
slice(flights, 1:10)
 Arrange rows with arrange()
arrange() works similarly to filter() except that
instead of filtering or selecting rows, it
reorders them
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:
 arrange()
arrange(flights, year, month, day)
 arrange() and desc()
Use desc() to order a column in descending
order:
arrange(flights, desc(arr_delay))
 The previous code is equivalent to:
flights[order(flights$year, flights$month, flights$day), ]
flights[order(desc(flights$arr_delay)), ]
 Select columns with select()
Often you work with large datasets with many
columns but only a few are actually of interest
to you
select() allows you to rapidly zoom in on a
useful subset using operations that usually
only work on numeric variable positions:
 select()
# Select columns by name
select(flights, year, month, day)
 select()
# Select all columns between year and day
(inclusive)
select(flights, year:day)
 select()
# Select all columns except those from year to
day (inclusive)
select(flights, -(year:day))
 There are a number of helper functions you
can use within select(), like starts_with(),
ends_with(), matches() and contains()
These let you quickly match larger blocks of
variables that meet some criterion.
See ?select for more details.
 rename column in select()
You can rename variables with rename() by
using named arguments:
rename(flights, tail_num = tailnum)
 Extract distinct (unique) rows
A common use of select() is to find the values
of a set of variables. This is particularly useful
in conjunction with the distinct() verb which
only returns the unique values in a table.
distinct(select(flights, tailnum))
distinct(select(flights, origin, dest))

This is very similar to base::unique() but should be

much faster.
 Add new columns with mutate()
Besides selecting sets of existing columns, its
often useful to add new columns that are
functions of existing columns. This is the job of
mutate():
 mutate()
mutate(flights, gain = arr_delay - dep_delay,
speed = distance / air_time * 60)
 mutate allows you to refer to columns that
youve just created:
mutate(flights, gain = arr_delay - dep_delay,
gain_per_hour = gain / (air_time / 60) )
 transmute()
If you only want to keep the new variables,
use transmute():
transmute(flights, gain = arr_delay - dep_delay,
gain_per_hour = gain / (air_time / 60) )
Summarise values with summarise()
The last verb is summarise(). It collapses a
data frame to a single row
summarise(flights, delay = mean(dep_delay,
na.rm = TRUE))
 Randomly sample rows with
sample_n() and sample_frac()
You can use sample_n() and sample_frac() to
take a random sample of rows
use sample_n() for a fixed number and
sample_frac() for a fixed fraction.
sample_n(flights, 10)
sample_frac(flights, 0.01)

Use replace = TRUE to perform a bootstrap sample. If needed,

you can weight the sample with the weight argument.
 Commonalities
You may have noticed that the syntax and
function of all these verbs are very similar:
The first argument is a data frame.
The subsequent arguments describe what to do with
the data frame. Notice that you can refer to columns
in the data frame directly without using $.
The result is a new data frame
Together these properties make it easy to chain
together multiple simple steps to achieve a
complex result.
 At the most basic level, you can only alter a tidy data
frame in five useful ways: you can
reorder the rows (arrange())
pick observations and variables of interest (filter() and
select())
add new variables that are functions of existing variables
(mutate())
collapse many values to a summary (summarise())
The remainder of the language comes from applying
the five functions to different types of data. For
example, how these functions work with grouped data.
GROUPED OPERATIONS
 These verbs are useful on their own, but they become
really powerful when you apply them to groups of
observations within a dataset.
In dplyr, you do this by with the group_by() function
It breaks down a dataset into specified groups of rows
When you then apply the verbs above on the resulting
object theyll be automatically applied by group.
Most importantly, all this is achieved by using the same
exact syntax youd use with an ungrouped object.
 In the following example, we split the
complete dataset into individual planes and
then summarise each plane by counting the
number of flights (count = n()) and computing
the average distance (dist = mean(Distance,
na.rm = TRUE)) and arrival delay (delay =
mean(ArrDelay, na.rm = TRUE)). We then use
ggplot2 to display the output.
by_tailnum <- group_by(flights, tailnum)
delay <- summarise(by_tailnum,
count = n(),
dist = mean(distance, na.rm = TRUE),
delay = mean(arr_delay, na.rm = TRUE))
delay <- filter(delay, count > 20, dist < 2000)
# Interestingly, the average delay is only slightly
related to the
# average distance flown by a plane.
ggplot(delay, aes(dist, delay)) + geom_point(aes(size =
count), alpha = 1/2) + geom_smooth() +
scale_size_area()
 You use summarise() with aggregate functions,
which take a vector of values and return a single
number. There are many useful examples of such
functions in base R like min(), max(), mean(),
sum(), sd(), median(), and IQR(). dplyr provides a
handful of others:
n(): the number of observations in the current group
n_distinct(x):the number of unique values in x.
first(x), last(x) and nth(x, n) - these work similarly to
x[1], x[length(x)], and x[n] but give you more control
over the result if the value is missing.
 For example, we could use these to find the
number of planes and the number of flights
that go to each possible destination:
destinations <- group_by(flights, dest)
summarise(destinations,
planes = n_distinct(tailnum),
flights = n()
)
 You can save the result in a new variable

Check type of t object

 Check all of data by change t object to
data.frame
 When you group by multiple variables, each
summary peels off one level of the grouping.
That makes it easy to progressively roll-up a
dataset:
 Chaining
The dplyr API is functional in the sense that
function calls dont have side-effects
You must always save their results
This doesnt lead to particularly elegant code,
especially if you want to do many operations
at once
 You either have to do it step-by-step:
 Or if you dont want to save the intermediate
results, you need to wrap the function calls
inside each other:
 This is difficult to read because the order of
the operations is from inside to out
Thus, the arguments are a long way away from
the function
To get around this problem, dplyr provides the
%>% operator
x %>% f(y) turns into f(x, y) so you can use it to
rewrite multiple operations that you can read
left-to-right, top-to-bottom:
New Expression by %>%