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 revise the concepts learned in this chapter:

  • How did we waste computation in the similarity_matrix function?
  • Both the Last.fm and the MusicBrainz API have a count value associated with each tag, which can be taken to represent the extent to which the tag applied to the artist. By ignoring this field, in both cases we implicitly used a count of 1 for every tag, making well-fitting tags just as important as relatively less well-fitting ones. Rewrite the code to take count into account, and weigh each tag proportionally to its count value. This will be challenging, but it will be invaluable for understanding the material. It will also boost your confidence as an R programmer once you finish. Go you!
  • How else might you be able to extend and improve upon our ragtag recommender system?
  • The efficient market hypothesis posits that since the price of financial instruments reflects all the relevant information about its value at any given time, it is impossible...