Data Tidying and Importing with R

Overview

Class Central Tips

Welcome to Data Tidying and Importing with R, the second course in the Data Science with R Specialization! This course aims to better develop your statistical toolkit in the world of statistics and data science. You will learn how to collect, manipulate, and transform data in R into a more readily usable format using tidyverse data pipelines, primarily using verbs from the dplyr and tidyr packages. The topics covered provide you with the tools necessary to convert data to be better suited for data visualization (Course 1) and modeling; which is to come in this certificate program in a future course. Additionally, we discuss the topics of web scraping and the considerations one must take prior to scraping data from the web.

Syllabus

Tidy Data

Tidy datasets have a specific structure: each variable is a column, and each observation is a row. In this module, we use functional verbs from the dplyr package in R to transform data into a ready-to-use tidy data format. Additionally, we use functional verbs to manipulate data frames.

Importing + Recoding Data

A column in our data set can be stored as many different types, such as numbers or characters. These different data types inform how R treats the data, and whether certain functions are compatible to use with certain types of data. In this module, we discuss more in detail, the different data types classified by R, data classes, as well as how to recode variables in a data set to be different types, classes, or take on different values.

Web Scraping and Programming

Web scraping is the process of extracting this information automatically and transforming it into a structured dataset. In this module, we go over how to perform basic web scraping in R to make an abundance of data online more easily accessible.