Data Manipulation in R with dplyr – Part 1

dplyr is one of the packages in R that makes R so loved by data scientists. It has three main goals:

1. Identify the most important data manipulation tools needed for data analysis and make them easy to use in R.
2. Provide blazing fast performance for in-memory data by writing key pieces of code in C++.
3. Use the same code interface to work with data no matter where it’s stored, whether in a data frame, a data table or database.

Introduction to the dplyr package and the tbl class
This post is mostly about code. If you’re interested in learning dplyr I recommend you type in the commands line by line on the R console to see first hand what’s happening.

Select and mutate
dplyr provides grammar for data manipulation apart from providing data structure. The grammar is built around 5 functions (also referred to as verbs) that do the basic tasks of data manipulation.

The 5 verbs of dplyr
select – removes columns from a dataset
filter – removes rows from a dataset
arrange – reorders rows in a dataset
mutate – uses the data to build new columns and values
summarize – calculates summary statistics

dplyr functions do not change the dataset. They return a new copy of the dataset to use.

To answer the simple question whether flight delays tend to shrink or grow during a flight, we can safely discard a lot of the variables of each flight. To select only the ones that matter, we can use select()

dplyr comes with a set of helper functions that can help you select variables. These functions find groups of variables to select, based on their names. Each of these works only when used inside of select()

• starts_with(“X”): every name that starts with “X”
• ends_with(“X”): every name that ends with “X”
• contains(“X”): every name that contains “X”
• matches(“X”): every name that matches “X”, where “X” can be a regular expression
• num_range(“x”, 1:5): the variables named x01, x02, x03, x04 and x05
• one_of(x): every name that appears in x, which should be a character vector

In order to appreciate the usefulness of dplyr, here are some comparisons between base R and dplyr

mutate() is the second of the five data manipulation functions. mutate() creates new columns which are added to a copy of the dataset.

So far we have added variables to hflights one at a time, but we can also use mutate() to add multiple variables at once.