Working with List Data in R using rrapply

Joris Chau pivots, unpivots, and unnests data in R:

The previous post showcases the rrapply() function in the minimal rrapply-package as a revised and extended version of base rapply() in the context of nested list recursion in R. For quick data exploration of a nested list it can make sense to keep the list in its original nested format to reduce the number of processing steps and minimize code complexity. As part of a more elaborate data analysis, if there is no specific reason to keep the nested data structure, it is often more practical to transform the nested list into a more convenient rectangular format and work with the unnested object (e.g. a data.frame) instead. In this follow-up post, we review the available (how) options in rrapply() to unnest or melt nested lists into a rectangular format in more detail and highlight the similarities and differences with respect to several common alternatives in R.

There’s a lot going on in this demo-packed post. H/T R-Bloggers.