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

Summary


This last chapter, which was uncharacteristically light on theory, may be one of the most important chapters in the whole book. In order to be a productive data analyst using R, you simply must be acquainted with the tools and workflows of professional R programmers.

The first topic we touched on was the link between best practices and reproducibility, and why reproducibility is an integral part of a productive and sane analyst's workflow. Next, we discussed the basics of R scripting, and how to run completed scripts all at once. We saw how RStudio - R's best IDE - can help us while we write these scripts by providing a mechanism to execute code, line-by-line, as we write it. To really cement your understanding of R scripting, we saw an example R script that illustrated clean design and adherence to best practices (informative variable names, readable layout, myriad informative comments, and so on).

Then, you learned of a few ways that you can organize multi-file analysis projects...