Dplyr
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Original author(s) | Hadley Wickham, Romain François, Lionel Henry, Kirill Müller, Davis Vaughan |
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Initial release | January 7, 2014; 10 years ago (2014-01-07) |
Stable release | 1.1.0 / January 29, 2023; 18 months ago (2023-01-29) |
Written in | R |
License | MIT License |
Website | dplyr |
dplyr is an R package whose set of functions are designed to enable dataframe (a spreadsheet-like data structure) manipulation in an intuitive, user-friendly way. It is one of the core packages of the popular tidyverse set of packages in the R programming language.[1] Data analysts typically use dplyr in order to transform existing datasets into a format better suited for some particular type of analysis, or data visualization.[2][3]
For instance, someone seeking to analyze a large dataset may wish to only view a smaller subset of the data. Alternatively, a user may wish to rearrange the data in order to see the rows ranked by some numerical value, or even based on a combination of values from the original dataset. Functions within the dplyr package will allow a user to perform such tasks.
dplyr was launched in 2014.[4] On the dplyr web page, the package is described as "a grammar of data manipulation, providing a consistent set of verbs that help you solve the most common data manipulation challenges."[5]
The five core verbs
While dplyr actually includes several dozen functions that enable various forms of data manipulation, the package features five primary verbs or actions:[6]
- filter(), which is used to extract rows from a dataframe, based on conditions specified by a user;
- select(), which is used to subset a dataframe by its columns;
- arrange(), which is used to sort rows in a dataframe based on attributes held by particular columns;
- mutate(), which is used to create new variables, by altering and/or combining values from existing columns; and
- summarize(), also spelled summarise(), which is used to collapse values from a dataframe into a single summary.
Additional functions
In addition to its five main verbs, dplyr also includes several other functions that enable exploration and manipulation of dataframes. Included among these are:
- count(), which is used to sum the number of unique observations that contain some particular value or categorical attribute;
- rename(), which enables a user to alter the column names for variables, often to improve ease of use and intuitive understanding of a dataset;
- slice_max(), which returns a data subset that contains the rows with the highest number of values for some particular variable;
- slice_min(), which returns a data subset that contains the rows with the lowest number of values for some particular variable.
Built-in datasets
The dplyr package comes with five datasets. These are: band_instruments
, band_instruments2
, band_members
, starwars
, storms
.
Copyright & license
The copyright to dplyr is held by Posit PBC, formerly RStudio PBC. dplyr was originally released under a GPL license[citation needed], but in 2022, Posit changed the license terms for the package to the "more permissive" MIT License.[7] The main difference between the two types of license is that the MIT license allows subsequent re-use of code within proprietary software, whereas a GPL license does not.
References
- ^ Wickham, Hadley; Averick, Mara; Bryan, Jennifer; Chang, Winston; McGowan, Lucy D'Agostino; François, Romain; Grolemund, Garrett; Hayes, Alex; Henry, Lionel; Hester, Jim; Kuhn, Max; Pedersen, Thomas Lin; Miller, Evan; Bache, Stephan Milton; Müller, Kirill (2019-11-21). "Welcome to the Tidyverse". Journal of Open Source Software. 4 (43): 1686. doi:10.21105/joss.01686. ISSN 2475-9066.
- ^ Yadav, Rohit (2019-10-29). "Python's Pandas vs R's Tidyverse: Who Comes Out On Top?". Analytics India Magazine. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
- ^ Krill, Paul (2015-06-30). "Why R? The pros and cons of the R language". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
- ^ "Introducing dplyr". blog.rstudio.com. 17 January 2014. Retrieved 2020-09-02.
- ^ "Function reference". dplyr.tidyverse.org. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
- ^ Grolemund, Garrett; Wickham, Hadley. 5 Data transformation | R for Data Science.
- ^ "A Grammar of Data Manipulation". tidyverse.org. Retrieved 2023-01-14.