How to tidy this dataset?

Question

I have the dataset below that I want to tidy up.

     user_id                topic may june july august september october
1     192775                 talk   2    0    0      2         2       1
2     192775                 walk 165  123  128    146       113     105
3     192775                 bark   0    0    0      0         0       0
4     192775                 harp   0    0    0      0         0       1

I want to use tidyr to shape into the below format.

user_id      month      talk      walk      bark      harp
192775       may           2       165         0         0
192775      june           0       123         0         0

Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

With:

library(tidyr)
df %>% gather(month, val, may:october) %>% spread(topic, val)

you get:

  user_id     month bark harp talk walk
1  192775    august    0    0    2  146
2  192775      july    0    0    0  128
3  192775      june    0    0    0  123
4  192775       may    0    0    2  165
5  192775   october    0    1    1  105
6  192775 september    0    0    2  113

---

Another option is to use recast from the reshape2-package:

library(reshape2)
recast(df, user_id + variable ~ topic, id.var = c('user_id','topic'))