Creating skimr
Author: Team skimr

# Creating `skimr`

#### Team skimr

#### 5/26/2017

## Motivation

The motivation of this project was to create a frictionless approach to quickly viewing summary statistics as part of a pipeline. There are many existing summary functions, but we found them lacking in one way or another because they can be generic, they don’t always provide easy-to-operate-on data structures, and they are not pipeable.

So at rOpenSci #unconf17, we created a new package that would let you quickly skim useful, tidy summary statistics directly from a pipe.

And so we created `skimr`.

In a nutshell, `skimr` will create a `skimr` object that can be further operated upon or that provides a human-readable printout in the console. It presents reasonable default summary statistics for numerics, factors, etc, and lists counts, and missing and unique values.

## Dev process

### About Team Members

Amelia McNamara
Job Title: Visiting Assistant Professor of Statistical & Data Sciences at Smith College
Project Contributions: Coder

Eduardo Arino de la Rubia
Job Title: Chief Data Scientist at Domino Data Lab
Project Contributions: Coder

Hao Zhu
Job Title: Programmer Analyst at the Institute for Aging Research
Project Contributions: Coder

Julia Lowndes
Job Title: Marine Data Scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
Project Contributions: Documention and test scripts

Shannon Ellis
Job Title: Postdoctoral fellow in the Biostatistics Department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Project Contributions: Test Scripts

Elin Waring
Job Title: Professor at Lehman College Sociology Department, City University of New York
Project Contributions: Coder

Michael Quinn
Job Title: Quantitative Analyst at Google
Project Contributions: Coder

Hope McLeod
Job Title: Data Engineer at Kobalt Music
Project Contributions: Documentation

- how we pulled it all together
- next steps/future (issues for later)

### Step-by-step thought process

We started off by brainstorming what we liked about existing summary packages and what other features we wanted. We started looking at example data, `mtcars`.

    str(mtcars)
    summary(mtcars)

#### What we like and dislike, in Amelia’s words

    # "I like what we get here because mpg is numeric so these stats make sense:"
    summary(mtcars$mpg)

    ##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
    ##   10.40   15.42   19.20   20.09   22.80   33.90

    # "But I don’t like this because cyl should really be a factor and shouldn't have these stats:"
    summary(mtcars$cyl)

    ##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
    ##   4.000   4.000   6.000   6.188   8.000   8.000

    # "This is OK, but not descriptive enough. It could be clearer what I'm looking at."
    mosaic::tally(~cyl, data=mtcars) # install.packages('mosaic')

    ## cyl
    ##  4  6  8
    ## 11  7 14

    # "But this output isn't labeled, not ideal."
    table(mtcars$cyl, mtcars$vs)

    ##
    ##      0  1
    ##   4  1 10
    ##   6  3  4
    ##   8 14  0

    # "I like this because it returns 'sd', 'n' and 'missing'":
    mosaic::favstats(~mpg, data=mtcars)

    ##   min     Q1 median   Q3  max     mean       sd  n missing
    ##  10.4 15.425   19.2 22.8 33.9 20.09062 6.026948 32       0

## Introducing `skimr`

- what we’ve implemented to overcome those dislikes
- examples of skimr features