Tidyverse

The tidyverse hex logo
Repository	github.com/tidyverse/tidyverse
Written in	R
Type	Package collection
License	MIT
Website	www.tidyverse.org

The tidyverse is a collection of open source packages for the R programming language introduced by Hadley Wickham ^[1] and his team that "share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures" of tidy data. ^[2] Characteristic features of tidyverse packages include extensive use of non-standard evaluation and encouraging piping. ^{[3] [4] [5]}

As of November 2018, the tidyverse package and some of its individual packages comprise 5 out of the top 10 most downloaded R packages. ^[6] The tidyverse is the subject of multiple books and papers. ^{[7] [8] [9] [10]} In 2019, the ecosystem has been published in the Journal of Open Source Software. ^[11]

Its syntax has been referred to as "supremely readable". ^[12] Critics of the tidyverse have argued it promotes tools that are harder to teach and learn than their base-R equivalents and are too dissimilar to other programming languages. ^{[13] [14]} On the other hand, some ^[15] have argued that tidyverse is a very effective way to introduce complete beginners to programming, as pedagogically it allows students to quickly begin doing powerful data processing tasks. ^{[16] [15]} Further to this, some practitioners have pointed out that data processing tasks are intuitively much easier to chain together with tidyverse compared to Python Pandas. ^[17]

Packages

The core packages, which provide functionality to model, transform, and visualize data, include: ^[18]

• ggplot2
• dplyr
• tidyr
• readr
• purrr
• tibble
• stringr
• forcats

Additional packages assist the core collection. ^[19] Other packages based on the tidy data principles are regularly developed, such as tidytext ^[20] for text analysis, tidymodels ^[21] for machine learning, or tidyquant ^[22] for financial operations.

References