General Purpose Hierarchical Data Structure for R
data.tree is an R package to manage hierarchical data and tree structures
Hierarchical data is ubiquitous in statistics and programming (XML, search trees, family trees, classification, file system, etc.). However, no general-use tree data structure is available in R. Where tabular data has data.frame, hierarchical data is often modeled in lists of lists or similar makeshifts. These structures are often difficult to manage. This is where the data.tree package steps in. It lets you build trees of hierarchical data for various uses: to print, to generate breakdowns, to integrate with html widgets, to rapid prototype search algorithms, to test out new classification ideas, and much more.
The package provides functionality to convert from and to various formats such as data.frames, list of lists, dendrograms, ape phylo, igraph, JSON, YAML, and more.
For more information and a few data.tree articles, see my blog.
The package is published on CRAN.