Introducing the Pokedex package

Table of Contents

• How many Pokemon in the package?
• Types
• Single and dual types
• How many by type?
• Game Over

library(pokedex)
library(tidyverse)
library(knitr)

How many Pokemon in the package?

I’ve tried to make the data set ‘tidy’ from the start, so we can use summarise to count them, and kable to make some dev.to friendly markdown tables.

pokemon %>% 
  summarise(count = n()) %>% 
  kable()

Types

Types are pretty key to Pokemon. Lets have a quick look at the Kanto starters and types.

pokemon %>% 
  top_n(n = -9, wt = species_id) %>% 
  select(identifier, type_1, type_2) %>%
  kable()

Single and dual types

So Pokemon can have either 1 or 2 types. What’s the split between single type and dual type Pokemon?

pokemon %>%
  mutate(dual_type = case_when(is.na(type_2) ~ TRUE,
                               TRUE ~ FALSE)) %>%
  group_by(dual_type) %>%
  summarise(count = n()) %>% 
  kable()

So, it’s nearly a 50:50 split of Pokemon that are single type to Pokemon that have 2 types.

How many by type?

But there are also quite a few types of Pokemon. Starting with the primary type, lets make a quick chart to understand the distribution of primary types. Using group_by will mean the summarise gets calculated per group. We can then pipe directly into ggplot for a col chart with geom_col.

pokemon %>%
  group_by(type_1) %>%
  summarise(count = n()) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = type_1, y = count)) +
  geom_col() +
  labs(title = "Pokemon by primary type")

Lots of water type Pokemon, and lots of normal type Pokemon, but very few flying types. Interesting. How about the secondary types?

pokemon %>% 
  filter(!is.na(type_2)) %>% 
  group_by(type_2) %>% 
  summarise(count = n()) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = type_2, y = count)) +
  geom_col() +
  labs(title = "Pokemon by secondary type",
       caption = "For Pokemon with dual type")

Look at all those ’mons with flying as a secondary type! The thing is that, game-wise, the order of the typing doesn’t matter. We can easily count the occurrence of a specific type in either primary or secondary position with pivot_longer.

pivot_longer is actually a newer tidyverse function. It is complemented with pivot_wider and this pair are intended to eventually replace spread and gather. By filtering out the NA I remove any observations of secondary types for Pokemon that don’t actually have them.

pokemon %>% 
  select(identifier, type_1, type_2) %>% 
  pivot_longer(-identifier, names_to = "slot", values_to = "type") %>% 
  group_by(type) %>% 
  summarise(count = n()) %>% 
  filter(!is.na(type)) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = type, y = count)) +
  geom_col() +
  labs(title = "Pokemon by either type",
       caption = "This will count a dual type Pokemon twice,\
once for each type")

So is there any consistency in order at all?

pokemon %>%
  filter((type_1 == "ghost" & type_2 == "fire") |
           (type_1 == "fire" & type_2 == "ghost")) %>% 
  select(identifier, type_1, type_2)

## # A tibble: 4 x 3
##   identifier  type_1 type_2
##   <chr>       <chr>  <chr> 
## 1 litwick     ghost  fire  
## 2 lampent     ghost  fire  
## 3 chandelure  ghost  fire  
## 4 blacephalon fire   ghost

It doesn’t look like it. a ghost fire Pokemon and a fire ghost Pokemon both turn up. I’d like to see what the coincidence rate is of each type in dual type Pokemon, so I need to get some ordering in. I can use case_when in mutate to create a two new columns in the data. I can make 2 in one call because mutate supports multiple expressions, each of which names a column, and then operates conditionally on the other 2 type columns. These new columns will:

• always have a value in the column type_1_ordered
• if the Pokemon is dual type, have a value in type_2_ordered
• always have the types alphabetically ordered between the two columns. i.e. it will always be fire, ghost, never ghost, fire.

pokemon %>%
  mutate(
    type_1_ordered = case_when(is.na(type_2) ~ type_1,
                               type_1 < type_2 ~ type_1,
                               TRUE ~ type_2),
    type_2_ordered = case_when(type_1 > type_2 ~ type_1,
                               TRUE ~ type_2)
  ) -> pokemon

What might the distribution be of the flying secondary type, per primary type?

pokemon %>%
  mutate(type_combined = case_when(
    !is.na(type_2_ordered) ~ paste(type_1_ordered, type_2_ordered),
    is.na(type_2_ordered) ~ type_1_ordered
  )) %>%
  group_by(type_combined) %>%
  summarise(count = n()) %>%
  arrange(desc(count)) %>%
  mutate(type_combined = as_factor(type_combined)) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = type_combined, y = count)) +
  geom_col() +
  labs(title = "Count of Pokemon by dual type",
       caption = "Ordered by count") + 
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90))

So the most often occurring dual type is flying normal. That explains the first 2 charts. It’s a bit tricky to see the rest though. Lets make a more useful plot.

pokemon %>% 
  group_by(type_1_ordered, type_2_ordered) %>% 
  filter(!is.na(type_2_ordered)) %>% 
  summarise(count = n()) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = type_1_ordered, y = type_2_ordered, size = count)) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(title = "Coincidence of a particular dual type")

So flying normal has the biggest count, with there being quite a few bug flying. That makes sense, as so many bug Pokemon have wings! There are also lot’s of bug poison and grass poison. That makes sense too, as so many bugs and plants are poisonous! How many Pokemon have unique types though?

pokemon %>% 
  group_by(type_1_ordered, type_2_ordered) %>% 
  filter(!is.na(type_2_ordered)) %>% 
  summarise(count = n()) %>% 
  filter(count == 1) %>% 
  ungroup() %>% 
  summarise(count = n()) %>% 
  kable()

24 Pokemon have unique dual types. Out of 807 that isn’t very many! Maybe these Pokemon might be particularly useful? I’ll try and work it out…

Game Over

This post has been a simple example of both the data in the package, but also the tidyverse methods of doing Exploratory Data Analysis. You can find out more about tidyverse here

I got the raw data from this repo by veekun. My package is available here, and the particular version I used for this post is here. Though it’s in a pretty raw state, I hope to improve over time.

I made this package to have a bigish, diverse set of data to play with, that lots of people recognise, and that has some inherent real world application. Pokemon is a huge franchise with multiple instalments. Lots of people have played it, and even if you haven’t you probably have an intuition about what a Pokemon is, and what data about a Pokemon might make sense, and mean in context with other Pokemon. Feel free to fork and mess around with as you like. I hope its fun, and maybe even useful!

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