── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
✔ dplyr 1.1.4 ✔ readr 2.1.5
✔ forcats 1.0.0 ✔ stringr 1.5.1
✔ ggplot2 3.5.1 ✔ tibble 3.2.1
✔ lubridate 1.9.4 ✔ tidyr 1.3.1
✔ purrr 1.0.4
── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ ggplot2::%+%() masks psych::%+%()
✖ ggplot2::alpha() masks psych::alpha()
✖ dplyr::arrange() masks plyr::arrange()
✖ purrr::compact() masks plyr::compact()
✖ dplyr::count() masks plyr::count()
✖ dplyr::desc() masks plyr::desc()
✖ dplyr::failwith() masks plyr::failwith()
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::id() masks plyr::id()
✖ dplyr::lag() masks stats::lag()
✖ dplyr::mutate() masks plyr::mutate()
✖ dplyr::rename() masks plyr::rename()
✖ dplyr::summarise() masks plyr::summarise()
✖ dplyr::summarize() masks plyr::summarize()
ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors
Week 1 (Workbook) - Getting Situated in R and tidyverse
Course Goals & Learning Outcomes
- Understand the cognitive and psychological underpinnings of perceiving data visualization.
- Identify good data visualizations and describe what makes them good.
- Produce data visualizations according to types of questions, data, and more, with a particular emphasis on building a toolbox that you can carry into your own research.
Course Expectations
- ~50% of the course will be in R
- You will get the most from this course if you:
- have your own data you can apply course content to
- know how to clean clean, transform, and manage that data
- today’s workshop is a good litmus test for this
Course Materials
- All materials (required and optional) are free and online
- Wickham & Grolemond: R for Data Science https://r4ds.had.co.nz
- Wickham: Advanced R http://adv-r.had.co.nz
- Wilke: Fundamentals of Data Visualization https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/
- Healy: Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction https://socviz.co
- Data Camp: All paid content unlocked
Assignments
Assignment Weights | Percent |
Problem Sets (5) | 20% |
Response Papers + Visualizations | 20% |
Final Project Proposal | 10% |
Class Presentation | 20% |
Final Project | 30% |
Total | 100% |
Response Papers / Visualizations
- The main homework in the course is your weekly visualization assignment
- The goal is to demonstrate how the principles and skills you learn in the class function “in the wild.”
- These should be fun and not taken too seriously! No one is judging you for a pulling a graphic from Instagram instead of Nature.
- Due 12:00 PM the day before (i.e. Tuesday) class (last class is “free points”)
Problem Sets
About every other week, there will be a practice set to help you practice what you’re learning.
These will have you apply the code you’ve been learning to your own data or a provided data set
Assigning them every other week aims to reduce burden while still allowing you to practice
Frequency / form will be adjusted as needed throughout the quarter
Final Projects
- I don’t want you to walk out of this course and not know how to apply what you learned
- Final project replaces final exam (there are no exams)
- Create a visualization for an ongoing project!
- Stage 1: Proposal (due 02/12/25)
- Stage 2: 1-on-1 meetings + feedback (due by 02/26/25)
- Stage 3: In-class presentations (03/12/25)
- Stage 4: Final visualization + brief write-up (due 03/19/25 at midnight)
Extra Credit
- Lots of talk series, etc. this winter
- 1 pt extra credit for each one you:
- go to,
- take a snap of a data viz,
- and critique it according to what you’ve learned in class
- max 5 pts
Class Time
- ~5-10 min: welcome and review (if needed)
- ~20-35 min: discussion / some lecture content on readings
- ~5-10 min: break
- ~40-60 min: workshop
- ~20-30 min: open lab
Course Topics
- Intro and Overview
- Cognitive Perspectives
- Proportions and Probability
- Differences and Associations
- Change and Time Series
- Uncertainty
- Piecing Visualizations Together
- Polishing Visualizations
- Interactive Visualizations Additional Topics:
- Spatial Information
- Automated Reports
- Diagrams
- More?
Questions on the Syllabus and Course?
Data Visualization
Why Should I Care About Data Visualization
- Summarizing huge amounts of information
- Seeing the forest and the trees
- Errors in probabilistic reasoning
- It’s fun!
Why Visualize Data in R
Why Use RStudio (Pivot)
- Also free
- Basically a GUI for R
- Organize files, import data, etc. with ease
- RMarkdown, Quarto, and more are powerful tools (they were used to create these slides!)
- Lots of new features and support
Why Use the tidyverse
- Maintained by RStudio (Pivot)
- No one should have to use a for loop to change data from long to wide
- Tons of integrated tools for data cleaning, manipulation, transformation, and visualization
- Even increasing support for modeling (e.g.,
tidymodels
)
Goals for Today
-
Review core principles of:
-
dyplr
(data manipulation) -
tidyr
(data transformation and reshaping)
-
Data Manipulation in dplyr
dplyr
Core Functions
-
%>%
: The pipe. Read as “and then.” -
filter()
: Pick observations (rows) by their values. -
select()
: Pick variables (columns) by their names. -
arrange()
: Reorder the rows. -
group_by()
: Implicitly split the data set by grouping by names (columns). -
mutate()
: Create new variables with functions of existing variables. -
summarize()
/summarise()
: Collapse many values down to a single summary.
Core Functions
%>%
filter()
select()
arrange()
group_by()
mutate()
summarize()
Although each of these functions are powerful alone, they are incredibly powerful in conjunction with one another. So below, I’ll briefly introduce each function, then link them all together using an example of basic data cleaning and summary.
1. %>%
- The pipe
%>%
is wonderful. It makes coding intuitive. Often in coding, you need to use so-called nested functions. For example, you might want to round a number after taking the square of 43.
The issue with this comes whenever we need to do a series of operations on a data set or other type of object. In such cases, if we run it in a single call, then we have to start in the middle and read our way out.
The pipe solves this by allowing you to read from left to right (or top to bottom). The easiest way to think of it is that each call of %>%
reads and operates as “and then.” So with the rounded square root of 43, for example:
2. filter()
Often times, when conducting research (experiments or otherwise), there are observations (people, specific trials, etc.) that you don’t want to include.
Often times, when conducting research (experiments or otherwise), there are observations (people, specific trials, etc.) that you don’t want to include.
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
3.00 20.00 26.00 28.78 35.00 86.00
Often times, when conducting research (experiments or otherwise), there are observations (people, specific trials, etc.) that you don’t want to include.
Code
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
3.0 16.0 17.0 16.3 18.0 18.0
But this isn’t quite right. We still have folks below 12. But, the beauty of filter()
is that you can do sequence of OR
and AND
statements when there is more than one condition, such as up to 18 AND
at least 12.
Code
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
12.0 16.0 17.0 16.4 18.0 18.0
Got it!
- But filter works for more use cases than just conditional
-
<
,>
,<=
, and>=
-
- It can also be used for cases where we want a single values to match cases with text.
- To do that, let’s convert one of the variables in the
bfi
data frame to a string. - So let’s change gender (1 = male, 2 = female) to text (we’ll get into factors later).
Now let’s try a few things:
1. Create a data set with only individuals with some college (==
).
2. Create a data set with only people age 18 (==
).
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
18 18 18 18 18 18
3. Create a data set with individuals with some college or above (%in%
).
Code
[1] "Some College" "Higher Degree" "College"
%in%
is great. It compares a column to a vector rather than just a single value, you can compare it to several
3. select()
- If
filter()
is for pulling certain observations (rows), thenselect()
is for pulling certain variables (columns). - it’s good practice to remove these columns to stop your environment from becoming cluttered and eating up your RAM.
- In our
bfi
data, most of these have been pre-removed, so instead, we’ll imagine we don’t want to use any indicators of Agreeableness (A1-A5) and that we aren’t interested in gender. - With
select()
, there are few ways choose variables. We can bare quote name the ones we want to keep, bare quote names we want to remove, or use any of a number ofselect()
helper functions.
A. Bare quote columns we want to keep:
B. Bare quote columns we don’t want to keep:
# A tibble: 2,800 × 22
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 E1 E2 E3 E4 E5 N1 N2 N3
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int>
1 2 3 3 4 4 3 3 3 4 4 3 4 2
2 5 4 4 3 4 1 1 6 4 3 3 3 3
3 4 5 4 2 5 2 4 4 4 5 4 5 4
4 4 4 3 5 5 5 3 4 4 4 2 5 2
5 4 4 5 3 2 2 2 5 4 5 2 3 4
6 6 6 6 1 3 2 1 6 5 6 3 5 2
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
# ℹ 9 more variables: N4 <int>, N5 <int>, O1 <int>, O2 <int>, O3 <int>,
# O4 <int>, O5 <int>, education <chr>, age <int>
C. Add or remove using select()
helper functions.
4. arrange()
- Sometimes, either in order to get a better sense of our data or in order to well, order our data, we want to sort it
- Although there is a base
R
sort()
function, thearrange()
function istidyverse
version that plays nicely with othertidyverse functions
.
So in our previous examples, we could also arrange()
our data by age or education, rather than simply filtering. (Or as we’ll see later, we can do both!)
We can also arrange by multiple columns, like if we wanted to sort by gender then education:
Bringing it all together: Split-Apply-Combine
Much of the power of
dplyr
functions lay in the split-apply-combine method-
A given set of of data are:
- split into smaller chunks
- then a function or series of functions are applied to each chunk
- and then the chunks are combined back together
5. group_by()
- The
group_by()
function is the “split” of the method - It basically implicitly breaks the data set into chunks by whatever bare quoted column(s)/variable(s) are supplied as arguments.
So imagine that we wanted to group_by()
education levels to get average ages at each level
Code
# A tibble: 2,800 × 8
# Groups: education [6]
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 age gender education
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr>
1 2 3 3 4 4 16 1 <NA>
2 5 4 4 3 4 18 2 <NA>
3 4 5 4 2 5 17 2 <NA>
4 4 4 3 5 5 17 2 <NA>
5 4 4 5 3 2 17 1 <NA>
6 6 6 6 1 3 21 2 Some College
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
- Hadley’s first law of data cleaning: “What is split, must be combined”
- This is super easy with the
ungroup()
function:
Code
# A tibble: 2,800 × 8
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 age gender education
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr>
1 2 3 3 4 4 16 1 <NA>
2 5 4 4 3 4 18 2 <NA>
3 4 5 4 2 5 17 2 <NA>
4 4 4 3 5 5 17 2 <NA>
5 4 4 5 3 2 17 1 <NA>
6 6 6 6 1 3 21 2 Some College
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
Multiple group_by()
calls overwrites previous calls:
Code
# A tibble: 2,800 × 8
# Groups: gender, age [115]
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 age gender education
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr>
1 2 3 3 4 4 16 1 <NA>
2 5 4 4 3 4 18 2 <NA>
3 4 5 4 2 5 17 2 <NA>
4 4 4 3 5 5 17 2 <NA>
5 4 4 5 3 2 17 1 <NA>
6 6 6 6 1 3 21 2 Some College
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
6. mutate()
-
mutate()
is one of your “apply” functions - When you use
mutate()
, the resulting data frame will have the same number of rows you started with - You are directly mutating the existing data frame, either modifying existing columns or creating new ones
To demonstrate, let’s add a column that indicated average age levels within each age group
Code
# A tibble: 2,800 × 9
# Groups: education [6]
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 age gender education age_by_edu
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr> <dbl>
1 6 6 3 4 5 19 1 Below HS 25.1
2 4 3 5 3 2 21 1 Below HS 25.1
3 5 5 5 2 2 17 1 Below HS 25.1
4 5 5 4 1 1 18 1 Below HS 25.1
5 4 5 4 3 3 18 1 Below HS 25.1
6 3 2 3 4 6 18 2 Below HS 25.1
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
mutate()
is also super useful even when you aren’t grouping
We can create a new category
Code
We could also just overwrite it:
7. summarize()
/ summarise()
-
summarize()
is one of your “apply” functions - The resulting data frame will have the same number of rows as your grouping variable
- You number of groups is 1 for ungrouped data frames
Code
Code
tidyr
- Now, let’s build off what we learned from dplyr and focus on reshaping and merging our data.
- First, the reshapers:
-
pivot_longer()
, which takes a “wide” format data frame and makes it long.
-
pivot_wider()
, which takes a “long” format data frame and makes it wide.
- Next, the mergers:
-
full_join()
, which merges all rows in either data frame
-
inner_join()
, which merges rows whose keys are present in both data frames
-
left_join()
, which “prioritizes” the first data set
-
right_join()
, which “prioritizes” the second data set
(See also:anti_join()
and semi_join()
)
Key tidyr
Functions
1. pivot_longer()
- (Formerly
gather()
) Makes wide data long, based on a key - Core arguments:
-
data
: the data, blank if piped -
cols
: columns to be made long, selected viaselect()
calls -
names_to
: name(s) of key column(s) in new long data frame (string or string vector) -
values_to
: name of values in new long data frame (string) -
names_sep
: separator in column headers, if multiple keys -
values_drop_na
: drop missing cells (similar tona.rm = T
)
-
Basic Application
Let’s start with an easy one – one key, one value:
Code
# A tibble: 69,492 × 6
SID gender education age item values
<chr> <int> <chr> <int> <chr> <int>
1 1 1 <NA> 16 A1 2
2 1 1 <NA> 16 A2 4
3 1 1 <NA> 16 A3 3
4 1 1 <NA> 16 A4 4
5 1 1 <NA> 16 A5 4
6 1 1 <NA> 16 C1 2
7 1 1 <NA> 16 C2 3
8 1 1 <NA> 16 C3 3
# ℹ 69,484 more rows
More Advanced Application
Now a harder one – two keys, one value:
Code
# A tibble: 69,492 × 7
SID gender education age trait item_num values
<chr> <int> <chr> <int> <chr> <chr> <int>
1 1 1 <NA> 16 A 1 2
2 1 1 <NA> 16 A 2 4
3 1 1 <NA> 16 A 3 3
4 1 1 <NA> 16 A 4 4
5 1 1 <NA> 16 A 5 4
6 1 1 <NA> 16 C 1 2
7 1 1 <NA> 16 C 2 3
8 1 1 <NA> 16 C 3 3
# ℹ 69,484 more rows
2. pivot_wider()
- (Formerly
spread()
) Makes wide data long, based on a key - Core arguments:
-
data
: the data, blank if piped -
names_from
: name(s) of key column(s) in new long data frame (string or string vector) -
names_sep
: separator in column headers, if multiple keys -
names_glue
: specify multiple or custom separators of multiple keys -
values_from
: name of values in new long data frame (string) -
values_fn
: function applied to data with duplicate labels
-
Basic Application
More Advanced
A Little More Advanced
More dplyr
Functions
The _join()
Functions
Often we may need to pull different data from different sources
There are lots of reasons to need to do this
We don’t have time to get into all the use cases here, so we’ll talk about them in high level terms
-
We’ll focus on:
full_join()
inner_join()
left_join()
right_join()
Let’s separate demographic and BFI data
Code
# A tibble: 2,800 × 26
SID A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 E1 E2
<chr> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int>
1 1 2 4 3 4 4 2 3 3 4 4 3 3
2 2 2 4 5 2 5 5 4 4 3 4 1 1
3 3 5 4 5 4 4 4 5 4 2 5 2 4
4 4 4 4 6 5 5 4 4 3 5 5 5 3
5 5 2 3 3 4 5 4 4 5 3 2 2 2
6 6 6 6 5 6 5 6 6 6 1 3 2 1
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
# ℹ 13 more variables: E3 <int>, E4 <int>, E5 <int>, N1 <int>, N2 <int>,
# N3 <int>, N4 <int>, N5 <int>, O1 <int>, O2 <int>, O3 <int>, O4 <int>,
# O5 <int>
Code
# A tibble: 2,800 × 4
SID education gender age
<chr> <chr> <int> <int>
1 1 <NA> 1 16
2 2 <NA> 2 18
3 3 <NA> 2 17
4 4 <NA> 2 17
5 5 <NA> 1 17
6 6 Some College 2 21
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
Before we get into it, as a reminder, this is what the data set looks like before we do any joining:
# A tibble: 2,800 × 29
SID A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 E1 E2
<chr> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int>
1 1 2 4 3 4 4 2 3 3 4 4 3 3
2 2 2 4 5 2 5 5 4 4 3 4 1 1
3 3 5 4 5 4 4 4 5 4 2 5 2 4
4 4 4 4 6 5 5 4 4 3 5 5 5 3
5 5 2 3 3 4 5 4 4 5 3 2 2 2
6 6 6 6 5 6 5 6 6 6 1 3 2 1
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
# ℹ 16 more variables: E3 <int>, E4 <int>, E5 <int>, N1 <int>, N2 <int>,
# N3 <int>, N4 <int>, N5 <int>, O1 <int>, O2 <int>, O3 <int>, O4 <int>,
# O5 <int>, gender <int>, education <chr>, age <int>
3. full_join()
Most simply, we can put those back together keeping all observations.
Joining with `by = join_by(SID)`
# A tibble: 2,800 × 29
SID A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 E1 E2
<chr> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int>
1 1 2 4 3 4 4 2 3 3 4 4 3 3
2 2 2 4 5 2 5 5 4 4 3 4 1 1
3 3 5 4 5 4 4 4 5 4 2 5 2 4
4 4 4 4 6 5 5 4 4 3 5 5 5 3
5 5 2 3 3 4 5 4 4 5 3 2 2 2
6 6 6 6 5 6 5 6 6 6 1 3 2 1
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
# ℹ 16 more variables: E3 <int>, E4 <int>, E5 <int>, N1 <int>, N2 <int>,
# N3 <int>, N4 <int>, N5 <int>, O1 <int>, O2 <int>, O3 <int>, O4 <int>,
# O5 <int>, education <chr>, gender <int>, age <int>
4. inner_join()
We can also keep all rows present in both data frames
Code
Joining with `by = join_by(SID)`
# A tibble: 501 × 29
SID education gender age A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 C1 C2 C3
<chr> <chr> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int>
1 1200 Some Colle… 2 18 1 5 6 5 5 5 6 5
2 1201 College 2 29 1 5 6 5 5 2 1 4
3 1202 Higher Deg… 1 46 2 5 6 5 6 6 6 6
4 1203 Higher Deg… 1 58 5 4 4 4 5 4 4 5
5 1204 Higher Deg… 2 38 1 4 6 6 6 4 4 5
6 1205 Higher Deg… 2 27 2 3 1 1 1 4 2 2
# ℹ 495 more rows
# ℹ 17 more variables: C4 <int>, C5 <int>, E1 <int>, E2 <int>, E3 <int>,
# E4 <int>, E5 <int>, N1 <int>, N2 <int>, N3 <int>, N4 <int>, N5 <int>,
# O1 <int>, O2 <int>, O3 <int>, O4 <int>, O5 <int>
5. left_join()
Or all rows present in the left (first) data frame, perhaps if it’s a subset of people with complete data
Joining with `by = join_by(SID)`
# A tibble: 2,577 × 29
SID education gender age A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 C1 C2 C3
<chr> <chr> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int>
1 6 Some Colle… 2 21 6 6 5 6 5 6 6 6
2 8 HS 1 19 4 3 1 5 1 3 2 4
3 9 Below HS 1 19 4 3 6 3 3 6 6 3
4 11 Below HS 1 21 4 4 5 6 5 4 3 5
5 15 Below HS 1 17 4 5 2 2 1 5 5 5
6 23 Higher Deg… 1 68 1 5 6 5 6 4 3 2
# ℹ 2,571 more rows
# ℹ 17 more variables: C4 <int>, C5 <int>, E1 <int>, E2 <int>, E3 <int>,
# E4 <int>, E5 <int>, N1 <int>, N2 <int>, N3 <int>, N4 <int>, N5 <int>,
# O1 <int>, O2 <int>, O3 <int>, O4 <int>, O5 <int>
6. right_join()
Or all rows present in the right (second) data frame, such as I do when I join a codebook with raw data
Joining with `by = join_by(SID)`
# A tibble: 2,800 × 29
SID education gender age A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 C1 C2 C3
<chr> <chr> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <int>
1 6 Some Colle… 2 21 6 6 5 6 5 6 6 6
2 8 HS 1 19 4 3 1 5 1 3 2 4
3 9 Below HS 1 19 4 3 6 3 3 6 6 3
4 11 Below HS 1 21 4 4 5 6 5 4 3 5
5 15 Below HS 1 17 4 5 2 2 1 5 5 5
6 23 Higher Deg… 1 68 1 5 6 5 6 4 3 2
# ℹ 2,794 more rows
# ℹ 17 more variables: C4 <int>, C5 <int>, E1 <int>, E2 <int>, E3 <int>,
# E4 <int>, E5 <int>, N1 <int>, N2 <int>, N3 <int>, N4 <int>, N5 <int>,
# O1 <int>, O2 <int>, O3 <int>, O4 <int>, O5 <int>