From ''for()'' loops to the ''split-apply-combine'' paradigm for column-wise tasks: the transition for a dinosaur

Published at December 11, 2020 ·  9 min read

I have been involved with data crunching for 30 years, and, due to my age, I see myself as a dinosaur within the R-users community. I must admit, I’m rather slow to incorporate new paradigms in my programming workflow … I’m pretty busy and the time I save today is often more important than the time I could save in the future, by picking up new techniques. However, resisting to progress is not necessarily a good idea and, from time to time, also a dinosaur feels like living more dangerously and exploring new ideas and views.

Some everyday data tasks: a few hints with R (revisited)

Published at January 28, 2020 ·  12 min read

One year ago, I published a post titled ‘Some everyday data tasks: a few hints with R’. In that post, I considered four data tasks, that we all need to accomplish daily, i.e.

1. subsetting
2. sorting
3. casting
4. melting

In that post, I used the methods I was more familiar with. And, as a long-time R user, I have mainly incorporated in my workflow all the functions from the base R implementation.

Some everyday data tasks: a few hints with R

Published at March 27, 2019 ·  9 min read

We all work with data frames and it is important that we know how we can reshape them, as necessary to meet our needs. I think that there are, at least, four routine tasks that we need to be able to accomplish:

1. subsetting
2. sorting
3. casting
4. melting

Obviously, there is a wide array of possibilities; I’ll just mention a few, which I regularly use.