Michael Grogan has a few tips for data cleaning with R:
6. Delete observations using head and tail functions
The head and tail functions can be used if we wish to delete certain observations from a variable, e.g. Sales. The head function allows us to delete the first 30 rows, while the tail function allows us to delete the last 30 rows.
When it comes to using a variable edited in this way for calculation purposes, e.g. a regression, the as.matrix function is also used to convert the variable into matrix format:
Salesminus30days←head(Sales,-30)
X1=as.matrix(Salesminus30days)
X1Salesplus30days<-tail(Sales,-30)
X2=as.matrix(Salesplus30days)
X2
Some of these tips are for people familiar with Excel but fairly new to R. These also use the base library rather than the tidyverse packages (e.g., using merge instead of dplyr’s join or as.date instead of lubridate). You may consider that a small negative, but if it is, it’s a very small one.