Reshaping and tidying up erroneous data

Erroneous data is regarded as data that falls outside of what is accepted and what should be rejected by the system. In this section, we will focus on two major activities: reshaping and tidying up erroneous data. With the R programming language, this process can be achieved with the tidyr package. This package is designed specifically for data tidying and works well with manipulated data. It is important that you install this package if you have newly installed the R environment.

The following steps are implemented to include this package in the R environment:

1. Use the install.packages command to install the tidyr package in its entirety:

> install.packages("tidyr")   

From this, we get the following output:

1. Now, it is important to include this package in your workspace (R environment). By including it, we can call the necessary libraries and functions associated with this package in the R workspace:

> library(tidyr) 

From this, we get the following output:

Once we have included the tidyr package in our system, we can proceed with reshaping and tidying up the mpg dataset. This process requires the following functions:

• gather()
• unite()
• separate()
• spread()