Here is an example how easy it is to use cdata to re-layout your data.
Tim Morris recently tweeted the following problem (corrected).
Please will you take pity on me #rstats folks?
I only want to reshape two variables x & y from wide to long!
Starting with:
d xa xb ya yb
1 1 3 6 8
2 2 4 7 9
How can I get to:
id t x y
1 a 1 6
1 b 3 8
2 a 2 7
2 b 4 9
In Stata it's:
. reshape long x y, i(id) j(t) string
In R, it's:
. an hour of cursing followed by a desperate tweet 👆
Thanks for any help!
PS – I can make reshape() or gather() work when I have just x or just y.
This is not to make fun of Tim Morris: the above should be easy. Using diagrams and slowing down the data transform into small steps makes the process very easy.
