[R] Do you use R for data manipulation?

[Zeljko Vrba]

Sorry for reply to the wrong person, I lost the original email.

> 
> Farrel Buchinsky wrote:
> >Is R an appropriate tool for data manipulation and data reshaping and data
> >organizing? I think so but someone who recently joined our group thinks 
> >not.
> >The new recruit believes that python or another language is a far better
> >tool for developing data manipulation scripts that can be then used by
> >several members of our research group. Her assessment is that R is useful
> >only when it comes to data analysis and working with statistical models.
>

I personally started to use R because I got tired of manually writing scripts
for data manipulation and processing.  The argument of your new recruit smells
of ignorance and resistance to learning something new.  Ask her _how_ did she
assess R, how much time she spent on her assessment and whether did she
actually try to run it and perform some concrete simple tasks.

(Yes, R is somewhat "different", it has a steep learning curve, but the effort
of learning it is worth it.  And yes, R can be used in the same way as any
other scripting language, i.e., it is not restricted to interactive work.)

Take a look at plyr and reshape packages (http://had.co.nz/), I have a hunch
that they would have saved me a lot of headache had I found out about them
earlier :)

I would also recommend investing in Phil Spector's book "Data manipulation with
R", it will get you started much faster.

I also find R's image files very convenient for sharing data (and code!) in a
very compact format (single file, portable across architectures).  When you
quit your R session, all the variables and functions get saved in the image
file, which you can take with you (or send to somebody else), start R again,
load the image into a new session and continue from where you left.  You won't
get this kind of automatic persistence in any scripting language out of the
box.

> >So what do you think:
> >1)R is a phenomenally powerful and flexible tool and since you are going to
> >do analyses in R you might as well use it to read data in and merge it and
> >reshape it to whatever you need.
> >OR
> >2) Are you crazy? Nobody in their right mind uses R to pipe the data around
> >their lab and assemble it for analysis.

I'd go with 1).  R has also interfaces towards databases through RODBC, so you
do not have to go through several conversions when you're about to process or
plot data in R.