Le Labo par Mathieu Rella

A tidy dataset is a tabular dataset where:

• each variable is a column
• each observation is a row
• each type of observational unit is a table

The first three images below depict a tidy dataset. This tidy dataset is in the field of healthcare and has two tables: one for patients (with their patient ID, name, and age) and one for treatments (with patient ID, what drug that patient is taking, and the dose of that drug).

The next image depicts the same data but in one representation of a non-tidy format (there are other possible non-tidy representations). The Drug A, Drug B, and Drug C columns should form one ‘Drug’ column, since this is one variable. The entire table should be separated into two tables: a patients table and a treatments table.

In practice, you may need to perform tidying work before exploration. You should be comfortable with reshaping your data or perform transformations to split or combine features in your data, resulting in new data columns. This work should be performed in the wrangling stage of the data analysis process.

This is also not to say that tidy data is the only useful form that data can take. In fact, as you work with a dataset, you might need to summarize it in a non-tidy form in order to generate appropriate visualizations.