To analyze the relationship of more than two variables, you would need to conduct multivariate descriptive statistics, which allows the comparison of factors. Additionally, it prevents the effect of a single variable from distorting the analysis. In this recipe, we will discuss how to conduct multivariate descriptive statistics using a correlation and covariance matrix.
Here, you can get the covariance matrix by inputting the first three variables in
mtcars
to thecov
function:> cov(mtcars[1:3]) mpg cyl disp mpg 36.324103 -9.172379 -633.0972 cyl -9.172379 3.189516 199.6603 disp -633.097208 199.660282 15360.7998
To obtain a correlation matrix of the dataset, we input the first three variables of
mtcars
to thecor
function:> cor(mtcars[1:3]) mpg ...