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 for analysis


This recipe will prepare the groundwork with the tools you need to complete this project. If you do not have R installed on your computer, please see the instructions in Chapter 1, Preparing Your Data Science Environment.

Getting ready

You need a computer with R installed and an Internet connection.

How to do it…

The following steps will get you prepared for the remainder of this chapter by downloading the dataset from the BLS website and ensuring that we have the needed R packages:

  1. Download the 27.5 MB compressed data from http://www.bls.gov/cew/data/files/2012/csv/2012_annual_singlefile.zip, and save it to a location that you will remember.

  2. Uncompress the file by right-clicking on it in Explorer or Finder, and use the appropriate menu item.

    Tip

    If you are familiar with the command line in the terminal in Linux/Mac OS X, you can easily uncompress the downloaded file using unzip 2012_annual_singlefile.zip.

  3. Launch the RStudio IDE on your computer (or just plain R for purists...