By ?group by? we are referring to a process involving one or more of the following steps
Splitting the data into groups based on some criteria
Applying a function to each group independently
Combining the results into a data structure
Of these, the split step is the most straightforward. In fact, in many situations you may wish to split the data set into groups and do something with those groups yourself. In the apply step, we might wish to one of the following:
Aggregation: computing