Data Manipulation : Comparing Tidyverse, data.table, and base R; Peter DeWitt

Back from a long, pandemic driven hiatus the Denver R Meetup is being revived. To kick things off we have the Alec Baldwin of R presenters - Peter DeWitt. With 12 + presentations (including the one he prepared but bailed on because his daughter was being born), Peter is our most prolific presenter. Ryan Elmore being a close second. Looking back at previous events, we also missed the group's 10th anniversary. The first Meetup was on Sept 14th 2010 and since then we have had 76 events. Thanks Ryan Elmore, Melissa Santos and Matt Parker and Ethan Brown for starting the group.

The talk will start at 7 pm.

Speaker: Peter Dewitt
Topic: Data Manipulation Dialects in R: Comparing the Tidyverse, data.table, and base R.

In this presentation we will explore the tradeoffs between easy to read syntax, memory use, processing time, and stability over time for three data manipulation dialects in R, the Tidyverse, data.table, and base R. Tidyverse is extremely popular had has a useful syntax but may lack speed and memory efficiency and changes in the api can become difficult to deal with for long term projects. The data.table package is extremely fast and able to handle large data sets but the trade off is an uncommon assignment method (assignment by reference) which is uncommon on the user level within R. Lastly, base R may not be particularly elegant, but is stable and will be supported long term.

Simple examples from importing data, modifying the contents of data, joins (merges), unions (rbinds), and other examples will be shown.

No one dialect is better than the other in all cases. The objective of this presentation is to provide some examples that may help translate between the dialects and to suggest which dialect could be preferable to meet specific objectives.

Location: Someplace new. We are going to be meeting at Table Public House. This restaurant/bar/coffee shop/ place for desserts is in the former VFW located just south of Evans Street along the bike path. It also has a play area for kids and there is a cool riverside park just across the bike path. Not that kids will be interested in Peter's talk, but this is how I first discovered the place.

For those wanting a car friendly address it is at

2190 S. Platte River Drive
Denver, CO, 80223. Plenty of parking.

Hope to see you for a good talk and a beer!

This event will not be streamed or recorded.