R Community of Practice

Week 2

Learning Goals

1. understand the challenges of working with dates in R
2. become familiar with the capabilities of the lubridate package
3. use lubridate to filter and summarize data by date

Challenges of Working with Dates

• interpreted as strings when imported to R
• many date formats
• inconsistent time units (e.g. months, leap years, time zones)

The Data

Scenario: we have a spreadsheet of data tracking research consults from 2018 to 2023. We want to accomplish the following tasks:

1. Change the date variable to date data type
2. Summarize the number of consults by year
3. Summarize consults by month for FY2022

Lubridate Time Spans

1. durations - measure physical time in seconds
2. periods – take into account human variations in time due to varying lengths of months, leap years, etc.
3. intervals – time span defined with a start and end time