Tidyverse Cheat Sheet For Beginners

The tidyverse cheat sheet will guide you through some general information on the tidyverse, and then covers topics such as useful functions, loading in your data, manipulating it with dplyr and lastly, visualize it with ggplot2.

In short, everything that you need to kickstart your data science learning with R!

Do you want to learn more? Also check out and star the Exploratory Data Analysis in R: Case Study course, also taught by David Robinson, for free now!

Also, don't miss out on our data.table cheat sheet for data manipulation in R and our other cheat sheets for data science.

What is Tidyverse?  

The tidyverse is a powerful collection  of  R  packages  that are actually  data tools for transforming and visualizing data. All packages of the tidyverse share an underlying philosophy and common APls.

The core packages are: 

• ggplot2, which implements the grammar of graphics. You can use it to visualize your data.
• dplyr is a grammar of data You can use it to solve the most common data manipulation challenges.
• tidyr helps you to create tidy data or data where each variable is in a column, each observation is a row end each value is a column, each observation is a row end each value is a cell. 
• readr is a fast and friendly way to read rectangular
• purrr enhances R"s functional programming (FP)toolkit by providing a complete and consistent set of tools for working with functions and vectors. 
• tibble is a modern re-imaginging of the data
• stringr provides a cohesive set of functions designed to make working with strings as easy as possible
• forcats provide a suite of useful  tools that solve common problems with factors.  

You can install the complete tidyverse with:

> install.packages("tidyverse")

Then, load the core tidyverse and make it available in your current R session by running:

> library(tidyverse)

Note: there are many other tidyverse packages with more specialised usage. They are not  loaded automatically with

library(tidyverse),so you'll need to load each one with its own call to library().

Useful Functions

> tidyverse_conflicts() #Conflicts between tidyverse and other packages
> tidyverse_deps() #List all tidyverse dependencies
> tidyverse_logo() #Get tidyverse logo, using ASCII or unicode characters
> tidyverse_packages() #List all tidyverse packages
> tidyverse_update() #Update tidyverse packages

Loading in the Data 

>	library(datasets) #Load the datasets package
>	library(gapminder) #Load the gapminder package
>	attach(iris) #Attach iris data to the R search path

Dplyr 

Filter 

filter() allows you to select a subset of rows in a data frame.

>iris%>% #Select iris data of species "virginica"
          filter(Species=1"virginica")

>iris%>% #Select iris data of species "virginica" and sepal length greater than 6. 
           filter(Species="virginica",
           Sepal.Length> 6)

Arrange 

arrange() sorts the observations in a dataset in ascending or descending order based on one of its variables.

>iris%>% #Sort in ascending order of sepal length
          arrange(Sepal.Length)
>iris%>% #Sort in descending order of sepal length
          arrange(desc(Sepal.Length))

Combine multiple dplyr verbs in a row with the pipe operator %>%:

>iris%>% #Filter for species "virginica" then arrange in descending order of sepal length
          filter(Species="virginica") %>% 
          arrange(desc(Sepal.Length))

Mutate 

mutate() allows you to update or create new columns of a data frame.

>iris%>% #Change Sepal.Length to be in millimeters
     mutate(Sepal.Length=Sepal.Length*10)
>iris%>% #Create a new column called SLMm
     mutate(SLMm=Sepal.Length*10)

Combine the verbs filter(), arrange(), and mutate():

>iris%>%
     filter(Species="Virginica") %>% 
     mutate(SLMm=Sepal.Length*10) %>% 
     arrange(desc(SLMm))

Summarize 

summarize() allows you to turn many observations into a single data point.

>iris%>% #Summarize to find the median sepal length 
     summarize(medianSL=median(Sepal.Length))

>iris%>% #Filter for virginica then summarize the median sepal Length
     filter(Species="virginica") %>% 
     summarize(medianSL=median(Sepal.Length))

You can also summarize multiple variables at once:

>iris%>%
     filter(Species="virginica") %>% 
     summarize(medianSL=median(Sepal.Length),
          maxSL=max(Sepal.Length))

group_by () allows you to summarize within groups instead of summarizing the entire dataset:

>iris%>% #Find median and max sepal length of each species 
     group_by(Species) %>% 
     summarize(medianSL=median(Sepal.Length), 
     maxSL=max(Sepal.Length))

>iris%>% #Find median and max petal length of each species with sepal length> 6 
     filter(Sepal.Length>6) %>%
     group_by(Species) %>% 
     summarize(medianPL=median(Petal.Length), 
     maxPL=max(Petal.Length))

ggplot2

Scatter Plot 

Scatter plots allow you to compare two variables within your data. To do this with ggplot2, you use geom_point()

>iris_small f- iris%>%
     filter(Sepal.Length > 5)

>ggplot(iris_small, aes(x=Petal.Length, #Compare petal width and length
     y=Petal.Width)) + geom_point()

Additional Aesthetics

Color

>ggplot(iris_small, aes(x=Petal.Length, 
     y=Petal.Width,
     calar=Species)) + 
  geom_point()

Size

>ggplot(iris_small, aes(x=Petal.Length,
          y=Petal.Width, 
          color=Species, 
          size=Sepal.Length)) +
     geom_point()

Faceting

>ggplot(iris_small, aes(x=Petal.Length,
          y=Petal.Width)) +
     geom_point()+ 
     facet_wrap(NSpecies)

 Line Plots 

>	by_year <-- gapminder %>% 
          group_by(year) %>%
          summarize(medianGdpPerCap=median(gdpPercap))
>	ggplot(by_year, aes(x=year,
          y=medianGdpPerCap))+
     geom_line()+ 
     expand_limits(y=0)

Bar Plots 

> by_species <--iris%>% 
     filter(Sepal.Length>6) %>% 
     group_by(Species) %>% 
     summarize(medianPL=median(Petal.Length))
> ggplot(by_species, aes(x=Species,
          y=medianPL)) +
     geom_col()

Histograms 

> ggplot(iris_small, aes(x=Petal.Length))+ 
     geom_histogram()

Box Plots 

> ggplot(iris_small, aes(x=Species,
          y=Sepal.Width))+
     geom_boxplot()

(Click above to download a printable version or read the online version below).

Learn more about Tidyverse

Here are a few extra Tidyverse resources to get you started:

Introduction to the Tidyverse

Working with Data in the Tidyverse

Network Analysis in the Tidyverse

Machine Learning in the Tidyverse