{"id":65193,"date":"2020-11-04T11:59:08","date_gmt":"2020-11-04T16:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ibkrcampus.com\/?p=65193"},"modified":"2022-11-21T09:46:34","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T14:46:34","slug":"working-with-tidy-financial-data-in-tidyr-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.interactivebrokers.com\/campus\/ibkr-quant-news\/working-with-tidy-financial-data-in-tidyr-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Working with Tidy Financial Data in tidyr – Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

See Part I<\/a> to get started with the necessary data and R packages.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The practical reality<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A good rule of thumb (and one that we follow) is to keep your data in long format whenever you\u2019re doing any data manipulation or processing and save wide format for displaying it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, there are exceptions and sometimes you have a reason not to do your processing in long format, for instance when a function requires a wide data frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That means that in reality, you\u2019ll often find yourself wanting to switch between long and wide format. Fortunately, Fortunately, using the tidyr<\/code> package, it is very simple to convert from long to wide format and back again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pivoting from long to wide<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve already seen an example of pivoting from long to wide format. Let\u2019s explore that in a little more detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We use tidyr::pivot_wider<\/code> to go from long to wide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most important arguments to the function are id_cols<\/code>, names_from<\/code> and values_from<\/code>, and they each specify a column in our long dataframe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n