Beginner’s Guide to Pivoting Data Frames in R
A step by step tutorial on how to convert a wide data frame to a long one
Many-a-times data collection happens in a column-by-column fashion. That means for every new data series we create a new column in our data table. E.g. John Hopkins COVID-19 dataset is built like that. A new column is added for every new day.
This results in very wide data frames. Such wide data frames are generally difficult to analyse. R language’s tidyverse library provides us with a very neat method to pivot our data frame from a wide format to a long one. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Basic Pivot Longer
pivot_longer() makes datasets longer by increasing the number of rows and decreasing the number of columns. To illustrate the most basic use of pivot_longer function we generate a dummy dataset using tribble() method.
Income Data Country-wise
This dummy dataset contains a country’s wealth distribution. Each row corresponds to a single country. It contains country’s name, and the percentage of people in one of the…
