Book Image

Data Analysis with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Data Analysis with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Frequently the tool of choice for academics, R has spread deep into the private sector and can be found in the production pipelines at some of the most advanced and successful enterprises. The power and domain-specificity of R allows the user to express complex analytics easily, quickly, and succinctly. Starting with the basics of R and statistical reasoning, this book dives into advanced predictive analytics, showing how to apply those techniques to real-world data though with real-world examples. Packed with engaging problems and exercises, this book begins with a review of R and its syntax with packages like Rcpp, ggplot2, and dplyr. From there, get to grips with the fundamentals of applied statistics and build on this knowledge to perform sophisticated and powerful analytics. Solve the difficulties relating to performing data analysis in practice and find solutions to working with messy data, large data, communicating results, and facilitating reproducibility. This book is engineered to be an invaluable resource through many stages of anyone’s career as a data analyst.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Smoothing


Since the removal of the irregular component and visualizing just the trend in a series is of such interest to practitioners, various methods of smoothing, or remove the roughness and noise of a series to get a better sense on the signal, have been devised.

Perhaps the simplest method of smoothing a series is to use a simple moving average. In this technique a window length is defined. Say our window is set to five observations: for each observation in the time series, then, the first two observations to the left and right (along with the current observation) are averaged; this average then becomes the new value at that point in the series.

Let's perform a simple moving average smoothing on the Gaussian noise series and visualize the results of using different window lengths. We will use the SMA function from the TTR package:

> library(TTR)
> sm5 <- SMA(gausnoise, n=5)
> sm10 <- SMA(gausnoise, n=10)
> sm15 <- SMA(gausnoise, n=15)
> head(sm5, n=10)
[1] NA NA...