What is the tidyverse?
The tidyverse is a package in R that is - in itself - a collection of individual R packages that all work closely together in the same way (they speak thesame kind of language, if you will). Data import & export, manipulation, exploration and visualization becomes simpler and more elegant by using new and additional syntax which is more intuitive to and readable for us humans.
The tidyverse is an opinionated collection of R packages designed for data science. All packages share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures. www.tidyverse.org
The tidyverse is a toolkit of functionality that is perfect for data scientists. Working with the tidyverse makes your code more intuitive and easy to read and understand. The tidyverse offers a more elegant way to approach the most common data science problems and is widely used today.
You can install the tidyverse via install.packages("tidyverse")
and you only have to install it once. Check the prompt for the resulting
output.
# installs the tidyverse
#install.packages("tidyverse")
# loads the tidyverse
library(tidyverse)
## -- Attaching packages --------------------------------------- tidyverse 1.3.2 --
## v ggplot2 3.3.6 v purrr 0.3.4
## v tibble 3.1.8 v dplyr 1.0.9
## v tidyr 1.2.0 v stringr 1.4.0
## v readr 2.1.2 v forcats 0.5.1
## -- Conflicts ------------------------------------------ tidyverse_conflicts() --
## x dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## x dplyr::lag() masks stats::lag()
Contents of the tidyverse
We’re going to briefly discuss the core contents of the tidyverse, what you might use these packages for and I’ll provide links to the respective documentation as well.
You will definitely not need to know and understand all of these packages, but I am sure that you will love using the functionality that these packages provide.
The core tidyverse includes the packages that you’re likely to use in everyday data analyses. As of tidyverse 1.3.0, the following packages are included in the core tidyverse:
ggplot2 (visualization)
ggplot2 is a system to create beautiful graphics, based on what they
call the grammar of graphics. You provide the data, tell ggplot2
how to map variables to aesthetics, what kind of geometry to use (lines,
points, bars etc.), and it takes care of the details. Go to
docs…
dplyr (wrangling)
dplyr provides a grammar of data manipulation, providing a consistent
set of verbs that solve the most common data manipulation challenges.
Go to docs…
tidyr (tidying)
tidyr provides a set of functions that help you get to tidy data. Tidy
data is data with a consistent form: in brief, every variable goes in a
column, and every column is a variable. Go to
docs…
readr (read & import)
readr provides a fast and friendly way to read rectangular data (like
csv, tsv, and fwf). It is designed to flexibly parse many types of data
found in the wild, while still cleanly failing when data unexpectedly
changes. Go to docs…
purrr (mapping)
purrr enhances R’s functional programming (FP) toolkit by providing a
complete and consistent set of tools for working with functions and
vectors. Once you master the basic concepts, purrr allows you to replace
many for loops with code that is easier to write and more expressive.
Go to docs…
tibble (enhanced data frames)
tibble is a modern re-imagining of the data frame, keeping what time
has proven to be effective, and throwing out what it has not. Tibbles
are data.frames that are lazy and surly: they do less and complain more
forcing you to confront problems earlier, typically leading to cleaner,
more expressive code. Go to docs…
stringr (strings)
stringr provides a cohesive set of functions designed to make working
with strings as easy as possible. It is built on top of stringi, which
uses the ICU C library to provide fast, correct implementations of
common string manipulations. Go to
docs…
forcats (factors)
forcats provides a suite of useful tools that solve common problems
with factors. R uses factors to handle categorical variables, variables
that have a fixed and known set of possible values. Go to
docs…
Tidyverse essentials
If you get to know the basics of ggplot, dplyr, tidyr and readr
you will be well-equiped to approach and tackle most data analysis
tasks. Once you become a more advanced user and start to feel that you
lack in functionality, the other tidyverse packages will be rather easy
to learn swiftly.
Wrap-up
All of these packages add-up in terms of functionality and are designed and meant to be used together! I highly recommend to read/scan through the documentation and make a bookmark in an R/tidyverse folder or something similar. This way, you’ll be one click away from help in case you get stuck while trying to get one or more of these functions to work in your own projects.
