Scripts

Hadley Whickham wrote a famous paper (for a certain definition of famous) about the importance of tidy data when doing data analysis. I want to talk a bit about that, using an example from a StackOverflow post, with a solution using pandas. The principles of tidy data aren’t language specific. A tidy dataset must satisfy three criteria (page 4 in Whickham’s paper): Each variable forms a column. Each observation forms a row. Each type of observational unit forms a table. In this StackOverflow post, the asker had some data NBA games, and wanted to know the number of days since a team last played. Here’s the example data: ...

As a graduate student, you read a lot of journal articles… a lot. With the material in the articles being as difficult as it is, I didn’t want to worry about organizing everything as well. That’s why I wrote this script to help (I may have also been procrastinating from studying for my qualifiers). This was one of my earliest little projects, so I’m not claiming that this is the best way to do anything. ...