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You're reading from  Practical Predictive Analytics

Product typeBook
Published inJun 2017
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781785886188
Edition1st Edition
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Ralph Winters
Ralph Winters
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Ralph Winters

Ralph Winters started his career as a database researcher for a music performing rights organization (he composed as well!), and then branched out into healthcare survey research, finally landing in the Analytics and Information technology world. He has provided his statistical and analytics expertise to many large fortune 500 companies in the financial, direct marketing, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries. He has worked on many diverse types of predictive analytics projects involving customerretention, anti-money laundering, voice of the customer text mining analytics, and health care risk and customer choice models. He is currently data architect for a healthcare services company working in the data and advanced analytics group. He enjoys working collaboratively with a smart team of business analysts, technologists, actuaries as well as with other data scientists. Ralph considered himself a practical person. In addition to authoring Practical Predictive Analytics for Packt Publishing, he has also contributed two tutorials illustrating the use of predictive analytics in Medicine and Healthcare in Practical Predictive Analytics and Decisioning Systems for Medicine: Miner et al., Elsevier September, 2014, and also presented Practical Text Mining with SQL using Relational Databases, at the 2013 11th Annual Text and Social Analytics Summit in Cambridge, MA. Ralph resides in New Jersey with his loving wife Katherine, amazing daughters Claire and Anna, and his four-legged friends, Bubba and Phoebe, who can be unpredictable. Ralph's web site can be found at ralphwinters.com
Read more about Ralph Winters

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Transposing a dataframe


You will sometimes be given a format that contains data that is arranged vertically and you want to flip it so that the variables are arranged horizontally. You will also hear this referred to as long format versus wide format. Most predictive analytics packages are set up to use long format, but there are often cases in which you want to switch rows with columns. Perhaps data is being input as a set of key pairs and you want to be able to map them to features for an individual entity. Also, this may be necessary with some time series data in which the data which comes in as long format needs to be reformatted so that the time periods appear horizontally.

Here is a data frame that consists of sales for each member for each month in the first quarter. We will use the text=' option of the read.table() function to read table data that we have pasted directly into the code. For example, this is from data that has been pasted directly from an Excel spreadsheet:

sales_vertical...
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Practical Predictive Analytics
Published in: Jun 2017Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781785886188

Author (1)

author image
Ralph Winters

Ralph Winters started his career as a database researcher for a music performing rights organization (he composed as well!), and then branched out into healthcare survey research, finally landing in the Analytics and Information technology world. He has provided his statistical and analytics expertise to many large fortune 500 companies in the financial, direct marketing, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries. He has worked on many diverse types of predictive analytics projects involving customerretention, anti-money laundering, voice of the customer text mining analytics, and health care risk and customer choice models. He is currently data architect for a healthcare services company working in the data and advanced analytics group. He enjoys working collaboratively with a smart team of business analysts, technologists, actuaries as well as with other data scientists. Ralph considered himself a practical person. In addition to authoring Practical Predictive Analytics for Packt Publishing, he has also contributed two tutorials illustrating the use of predictive analytics in Medicine and Healthcare in Practical Predictive Analytics and Decisioning Systems for Medicine: Miner et al., Elsevier September, 2014, and also presented Practical Text Mining with SQL using Relational Databases, at the 2013 11th Annual Text and Social Analytics Summit in Cambridge, MA. Ralph resides in New Jersey with his loving wife Katherine, amazing daughters Claire and Anna, and his four-legged friends, Bubba and Phoebe, who can be unpredictable. Ralph's web site can be found at ralphwinters.com
Read more about Ralph Winters