Blog 7
Posted by Kati Togliatti
Blog 7:
The spilt-apply-combine strategy is when a large dataset or problem is broken up into smaller parts and then each piece is changed independently and put back together. Some examples when this strategy is used is creating new variables that are calculated on a per-group basis or when creating summaries for display. It is helpful so that you don’t become overwhelmed with a large dataset or something that you can’t handle so you don’t end up like Channing Tatum on the ground crying.
In class cleaning the weather data would be an example of this strategy. Some advantages of using this strategy are that working with smaller sets of data is much easier to handle. Also, in R the plyr function can do a lot of this very easily for you with a line of code. Using the tools available in R makes this strategy easy so that you can accomplish your goals and be a boss like Jean-Claude Van Damme.
