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

Functional programming as a main tidyverse principle


It would serve us well to point out some of these principles before we get to using dplyr--this will help us contrast these tidy tools with data.table’s approach and add context to the types of manipulations that we’ll be seeing shortly. There is one main principle, in particular, that I believe underlies a lot of the other doctrines of the manifesto: the call to embrace functional programming.

Functional programming is a hot topic in computer science research. There’s a whole lot to know about this programming paradigm, and any attempt to distill it down to a paragraph explanation (which we are about to do) will be an oversimplification. But, mainly, this paradigm strongly advocates for the use of functions as routines that (a) do not modify their arguments, (b) do not modify anything, and (c) whose behavior is always the same given the same inputs. The functional approach, as a consequence of its ideals, lends itself to the creation and...