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

Regression with a non-binary predictor


Back in a previous section, I promised that the same dummy-coding method that we used to regress binary categorical variables could be adapted to handle categorical variables with more than two values. For an example of this, we are going to use the same WeightLoss dataset as we did to illustrate ANOVA.

To review, the WeightLoss dataset contains pounds lost and self-esteem measurements for three weeks for three different groups: a control group, one group just on a diet, and one group that dieted and exercised. We will be trying to predict the amount of weight lost in week two by the group the participant was in.

Instead of just having one dummy-coded predictor, we now need two. Specifically:

Consequently, the equations describing our predictive model are:

This means that b0 is the mean of weight lost in the control group, b1 is the difference in the weight lost between the control and diet only group, and b2 is the difference in the weight lost between...