Book Image

Practical Data Science Cookbook

By : Tony Ojeda, Sean Patrick Murphy, Benjamin Bengfort, Abhijit Dasgupta
Book Image

Practical Data Science Cookbook

By: Tony Ojeda, Sean Patrick Murphy, Benjamin Bengfort, Abhijit Dasgupta

Overview of this book

<p>As increasing amounts of data is generated each year, the need to analyze and operationalize it is more important than ever. Companies that know what to do with their data will have a competitive advantage over companies that don't, and this will drive a higher demand for knowledgeable and competent data professionals.</p> <p>Starting with the basics, this book will cover how to set up your numerical programming environment, introduce you to the data science pipeline (an iterative process by which data science projects are completed), and guide you through several data projects in a step-by-step format. By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will quickly familiarize yourself with the process and learn how to apply it to a variety of situations with examples in the two most popular programming languages for data analysis—R and Python.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Practical Data Science Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Analyzing automobile fuel efficiency over time


We have now successfully imported the data and looked at some important high-level statistics that provided us with a basic understanding of what values are in the dataset and how frequently some features appear. With this recipe, we continue the exploration by looking at some of the fuel efficiency metrics over time and in relation to other data points.

Getting ready

If you completed the previous recipe, you should have everything you need to continue.

How to do it...

The following steps will use both plyr and the graphing library, ggplot2, to explore the dataset:

  1. Let's start by looking at whether there is an overall trend of how MPG changes over time on an average. To do this, we use the ddply function from the plyr package to take the vehicles data frame, aggregate rows by year, and then, for each group, we compute the mean highway, city, and combine fuel efficiency. The result is then assigned to a new data frame, mpgByYr. Note that this is our...