Data Wrangling with R This guide for practicing statisticians data scientists and R users and programmers will teach the essentials of preprocessing: data leveraging the R programming language to easily and quickly turn noisy data into usable pieces of information. Data wrangling which is also commonly referred to as data munging transformation manipulation janitor work etc. can be a painstakingly laborious process. Roughly 80% of data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data; however being a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow (visualization analysis reporting) it is essential that one become fluent and efficient in data wrangling techniques. This book will guide the user through the data wrangling process via a step by step tutorial approach and provide a solid foundation working with data in R. The authors goal is to teach the user how to easily wrangle data in order to spend more time on understanding the content of the data. By the end of the book the user will have learned: How to work with different types of data such as numerics characters regular expressions factors and dates The difference between different data structures and how to create add additional components to and subset each data structure How to acquire and parse data from locations previously inaccessible How to develop functions and use loop control structures to reduce code redundancy How to use pipe operators to simplify code and make it more readable How to reshape the layout of data and manipulate summarize and join data sets In essence the user will have the data wrangling toolbox required for modern day data analysis. Brad Boehmke Ph.D. is an Operations Research Analyst at Headquarters Air Force Materiel Command Studies and Analyses Division. He is also Assistant Professor in the Operational Sciences Department at the Air Force Institute of Technology. Dr. Boehmkes research interests are in the areas of cost analysis economic modeling decision analysis and developing applied modeling applications through the R statistical language. Preface Introduction Working with Different Types of Data in R Managing Data Structures in R Importing Scraping and Exporting Data with R Creating Efficient & Readable Code in R Shaping & Transforming Your Data with R.