Data is often stored in a stacked format, which is also referred to as record format. This is common in databases, .csv files, and Excel spreadsheets. In a stacked format, the data is often not normalized and has repeated values in many columns, or values that should logically exist in other tables (violating another concept of tidy data).
Take the following data which represents a stream of data from an accelerometer on a
An issue with this data as it is organized is: how does one go about determining the readings for a specific axis? This can be naively done with Boolean selections:
An issue here is, what if you want to know the values for all axes at a given time and not just the x axis. To do this, you can perform a selection for each value of the axis, but that is repetitive code and does not handle the scenario of new axis values...
