Reshaping Data with tidyr

You'll be introduced to the concept of tidy data which is central to this course. In the first two lessons, you'll jump straight into the action by separating messy character columns into tidy variables and observations ready for analysis. In the final lesson, you'll learn how to overwrite and remove missing values.

This chapter is all about pivoting data from a wide to long format and back again using the pivot_longer() and pivot_wider() functions. You'll need these functions when variables are hidden in messy column names or when variables are stored in rows instead of columns. You'll learn about space dogs, nuclear bombs, and planet temperatures along the way.

Values can often be missing in your data, and sometimes entire observations are absent too. In this chapter, you'll learn how to complete your dataset with these missing observations. You'll add observations with zero values to counted data, expand time series to a full sequence of intervals, and more!

In the final chapter, you'll learn how to turn nested data structures such as JSON and XML files into tidy, rectangular data. This skill will enable you to process data from web APIs. You'll also learn how nested data structures can be used to write elegant modeling pipelines that produce tidy outputs.