Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By : Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose
Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By: Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose

Overview of this book

Data science is hot. Bloomberg named a data scientist as the ‘hottest job in America’. Python and R are the top two open-source data science tools using which you can produce hands-on solutions to real-world business problems, using state-of-the-art techniques. Each chapter in the book presents step-by-step instructions and walkthroughs for solving data science problems using Python and R. You’ll learn how to prepare data, perform exploratory data analysis, and prepare to model the data. As you progress, you’ll explore what are decision trees and how to use them. You’ll also learn about model evaluation, misclassification costs, naïve Bayes classification, and neural networks. The later chapters provide comprehensive information about clustering, regression modeling, dimension reduction, and association rules mining. The book also throws light on exciting new topics, such as random forests and general linear models. The book emphasizes data-driven error costs to enhance profitability, which avoids the common pitfalls that may cost a company millions of dollars. By the end of this book, you’ll have enough knowledge and confidence to start providing solutions to data science problems using R and Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
17
INDEX
18
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

2.3 DOWNLOADING R AND RSTUDIO

It is time to switch programming languages. In this section we cover the same fundamental skills for the statistical programming language R that we did in the previous section for Python. In this chapter and throughout this book, you will find a lot of similarities in the way Python and R do things, such as saving output, and a lot of differences, such as importing packages.

To run R code, we need to download both R and RStudio. To download R, go to the R installation page,2 choose a mirror, and follow the directions for downloading R for your operating system. To download RStudio, go to the RStudio installation page3and select the download link for your operating system. After installation, locate RStudio and open it.

Figure 2.12 shows the RStudio window when you first open it. If you open RStudio and there are only three panels, click on File > New File > R Script to get the four‐panel display shown in Figure 2.12. The top‐left box...