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

Exercises


Practice the following exercises to reinforce the concepts learned in this chapter:

  • Write a function that will take a vector holding MCMC samples for a parameter and plot a density curve depicting the posterior distribution and the 95% credible interval. Be careful of different scales on the y-axis.
  • Fitting a normal curve to an empirical distribution is conceptually easy, but not very robust. For distribution fitting that is more robust to outliers, it's common to use a t-distribution instead of the normal distribution, since the t has heavier tails. View the distribution of the shape attribute of the built-in rock dataset. Does this look normally distributed? Find the parameters of a normal curve that is a fit to the data. In JAGS, dt, the t-distribution density function, takes three parameters: the mean, the precision, and the degrees of freedom that controls the heaviness of the tails. Find the parameters after fitting a t-distribution to the data. Are the means similar? Which...