PLOTCON 2016: Jenny Bryan, Behind every great plot there's a great deal of wrangling

If you are struggling to make a plot, tear yourself away from stackoverflow for a moment and ... take a hard look at your data. Is it really in the most favorable form for the task at hand? Time and time again I have found that my visualization struggles are really a symptom of unfinished data wrangling. R has long had excellent facilities for data aggregation or "split-apply-combine": split an object into pieces, compute on each piece, and glue the result back together again. Recent developments, especially in the purrr package, have made "split-apply-combine" even easier and more general. But this requires a certain comfort level with lists, especially with lists that are columns inside a data frame. This is unfamiliar to most of us. I give an overview of this set of problems and match them up with solutions based on grouped, nested, and split data frames.


Jennifer Bryan is an Associate Professor in the Statistics Department and the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She's a biostatistician specialized in genomics and takes a special interest and delight in data analysis and statistical computing.