We say that a data table is in tidy format if each row represents one observation and columns represent the different variables available for each of these observations. The murders dataset is an example of a tidy data frame.

#>        state abb region population total
#> 1    Alabama  AL  South    4779736   135
#> 2     Alaska  AK   West     710231    19
#> 3    Arizona  AZ   West    6392017   232
#> 4   Arkansas  AR  South    2915918    93
#> 5 California  CA   West   37253956  1257
#> 6   Colorado  CO   West    5029196    65

Each row represent a state with each of the five columns providing a different variable related to these states: name, abbreviation, region, population, and total murders.

To see how the same information can be provided in different formats, consider the following example:

#>       country year fertility
#> 1     Germany 1960      2.41
#> 2 South Korea 1960      6.16
#> 3     Germany 1961      2.44
#> 4 South Korea 1961      5.99
#> 5     Germany 1962      2.47
#> 6 South Korea 1962      5.79

This tidy dataset provides fertility rates for two countries across the years. This is a tidy dataset because each row presents one observation with the three variables being country, year, and fertility rate. However, this dataset originally came in another format and was reshaped for the dslabs package. Originally, the data was in the following format:

#>       country 1960 1961 1962
#> 1     Germany 2.41 2.44 2.47
#> 2 South Korea 6.16 5.99 5.79

The same information is provided, but there are two important differences in the format: 1) each row includes several observations and 2) one of the variables, year, is stored in the header. For the tidyverse packages to be optimally used, data need to be reshaped into tidy format, which you will learn to do in the Data Wrangling part of the book. Until then, we will use example datasets that are already in tidy format.

Although not immediately obvious, as you go through the book you will start to appreciate the advantages of working in a framework in which functions use tidy formats for both inputs and outputs. You will see how this permits the data analyst to focus on more important aspects of the analysis rather than the format of the data.