Dplyr

dplyr is an R package whose set of functions are designed to enable dataframe (a spreadsheet-like data structure) manipulation in an intuitive, user-friendly way. It is one of the core packages of the popular tidyverse set of packages in the R programming language.^[1] Data analysts typically use dplyr in order to transform existing datasets into a format better suited for some particular type of analysis, or data visualization.^[2][3]

dplyr

Original author(s)	Hadley Wickham, Romain François, Lionel Henry, Kirill Müller, Davis Vaughan
Initial release	January 7, 2014; 11 years ago (2014-01-07)
Stable release	1.1.0 / January 29, 2023; 2 years ago (2023-01-29)
Written in	R
License	MIT License
Website	dplyr.tidyverse.org//

For instance, someone seeking to analyze a large dataset may wish to only view a smaller subset of the data. Alternatively, a user may wish to rearrange the data in order to see the rows ranked by some numerical value, or even based on a combination of values from the original dataset. Functions within the dplyr package will allow a user to perform such tasks.

dplyr was launched in 2014.^[4] On the dplyr web page, the package is described as "a grammar of data manipulation, providing a consistent set of verbs that help you solve the most common data manipulation challenges."^[5]

The five core verbs

While dplyr actually includes several dozen functions that enable various forms of data manipulation, the package features five primary verbs or actions:^[6]

• filter(), which is used to extract rows from a dataframe, based on conditions specified by a user;
• select(), which is used to subset a dataframe by its columns;
• arrange(), which is used to sort rows in a dataframe based on attributes held by particular columns;
• mutate(), which is used to create new variables, by altering and/or combining values from existing columns; and
• summarize(), also spelled summarise(), which is used to collapse values from a dataframe into a single summary.

Additional functions

In addition to its five main verbs, dplyr also includes several other functions that enable exploration and manipulation of dataframes. Included among these are:

• count(), which is used to sum the number of unique observations that contain some particular value or categorical attribute;
• rename(), which enables a user to alter the column names for variables, often to improve ease of use and intuitive understanding of a dataset;
• slice_max(), which returns a data subset that contains the rows with the highest number of values for some particular variable;
• slice_min(), which returns a data subset that contains the rows with the lowest number of values for some particular variable.

Built-in datasets

The dplyr package comes with five datasets. These are: band_instruments, band_instruments2, band_members, starwars, storms.

Copyright & license

The copyright to dplyr is held by Posit PBC, formerly RStudio PBC. dplyr was originally released under a GPL license^{[citation needed]}, but in 2022, Posit changed the license terms for the package to the "more permissive" MIT License.^[7] The main difference between the two types of license is that the MIT license allows subsequent re-use of code within proprietary software, whereas a GPL license does not.