Content Request Data Manipulation Section

[MatthijstenTije]

Content Request

I want to start working on the data manipulation section of the website. Lachlan has sent me a cookbook for working with data in R, and I came across the following subjects I want to write an article about, as I think they would be useful for students. If there are other subjects that wants to be worked on, feel free to add.

Data Wrangling

Working with Factors in R

I want to start by explaining the factor() function and discuss an example, its structure, ordering levels, renaming of levels, and how to order categorical values. As a more advanced case, I want to highlight the forecasts package and show how to reorder factor levels by sorting along another variable within ggplot.

Data Transformations with dplyr

This is very common stuff, and I think every course teaches the dplyr package. However, I think a more in-depth look at the dplyr packages combined with R helper functions would add to most students' toolkit. I plan to work with several sections:

• Subsetting, where filter and select are discussed along with their helper functions.
• Aggregating, where summarize and group_by are discussed along with the helper functions.

Working With Character Data inside R

I want to discuss several functions that are useful when variables in a dataset are character-based and need to be transformed in some way. I want to focus on the following functions: paste(), paste0(), substr(), substring(), Regular Expressions, and lastly substitution using sub(), gsub(), grep(), and grepl().I

Sources

• https://dzchilds.github.io/eda-for-bio/index.html
• https://bookdown.org/jgscott/DSGI/lesson_data.html
• https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~hemken/Rworkshops/dwr/first-steps-with-dataframes.html#save-your-dataframe-and-script
• https://pp4rs.github.io/pp4rs-rstats/

[lachlandeer]

This looks like a good starting point!

Looking forward to see the new content. Do you have a rough timeline for completion?

[MatthijstenTije]

Great! I waited for approval, so I am yet to start on it! somewhere in the summer (mid-July/begin august)? I have some vacations planned and work for Tilburg.ai.