Section 2.3 Attribute operations
We mentioned above that we were using attribute operations. These are changes to the data which we make based on manipulation of elements in the attribute table. For example, the use of
filter() is an attribute operation, because we rely on the data in the attribute table in order to accomplish this task.
For example, let’s say we want to focus only on violent crime. To do this, we use the information in the attribute table, namely the values for the
crime_type variable for each observation (crime) in our data set.
crimes <- crimes %>%
filter(crime_type == "Violence and sexual offences")
With the above, we select only those crimes (rows of the attribute table) where the
crime_type variable meets a certain criteria (takes the value of "Violence and sexual offences"). Spatial operations on the other hand manipulate the geometry part of our data. We rely on the spatial information to accomplish the tasks of interest. In the next section, we will work through some examples of these.
