Book Image

Practical Data Science Cookbook

By : Tony Ojeda, Sean Patrick Murphy, Benjamin Bengfort, Abhijit Dasgupta
Book Image

Practical Data Science Cookbook

By: Tony Ojeda, Sean Patrick Murphy, Benjamin Bengfort, Abhijit Dasgupta

Overview of this book

<p>As increasing amounts of data is generated each year, the need to analyze and operationalize it is more important than ever. Companies that know what to do with their data will have a competitive advantage over companies that don't, and this will drive a higher demand for knowledgeable and competent data professionals.</p> <p>Starting with the basics, this book will cover how to set up your numerical programming environment, introduce you to the data science pipeline (an iterative process by which data science projects are completed), and guide you through several data projects in a step-by-step format. By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will quickly familiarize yourself with the process and learn how to apply it to a variety of situations with examples in the two most popular programming languages for data analysis—R and Python.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Practical Data Science Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Preparing R for your first project


For the following recipes, you will need the R statistical programming language installed on your computer (either the base R or RStudio, but the authors strongly recommend using the excellent and free RStudio) and the automobile fuel efficiency dataset. This quick recipe will help you ensure that you have everything you will need to complete this analysis project.

Getting ready

You will need an Internet connection to complete this recipe, and we assume that you have installed RStudio for your particular platform, based on the instructions in the previous chapter.

How to do it...

If you are using RStudio, the following three steps will get you ready to roll:

  1. Launch RStudio on your computer.

  2. At the R console prompt, install the two R packages needed for this project:

    install.packages("plyr")
    install.packages("ggplot2")
    install.packages("reshape2")
    
  3. Load the R packages, as follows:

    library(plyr)
    library(ggplot2)
    library(reshape2)
    

How it works...

R's strength comes...