Book Image

R: Mining spatial, text, web, and social media data

By : Nathan H. Danneman, Richard Heimann, Pradeepta Mishra, Bater Makhabel
Book Image

R: Mining spatial, text, web, and social media data

By: Nathan H. Danneman, Richard Heimann, Pradeepta Mishra, Bater Makhabel

Overview of this book

Data mining is the first step to understanding data and making sense of heaps of data. Properly mined data forms the basis of all data analysis and computing performed on it. This learning path will take you from the very basics of data mining to advanced data mining techniques, and will end up with a specialized branch of data mining—social media mining. You will learn how to manipulate data with R using code snippets and how to mine frequent patterns, association, and correlation while working with R programs. You will discover how to write code for various predication models, stream data, and time-series data. You will also be introduced to solutions written in R based on R Hadoop projects. Now that you are comfortable with data mining with R, you will move on to implementing your knowledge with the help of end-to-end data mining projects. You will learn how to apply different mining concepts to various statistical and data applications in a wide range of fields. At this stage, you will be able to complete complex data mining cases and handle any issues you might encounter during projects. After this, you will gain hands-on experience of generating insights from social media data. You will get detailed instructions on how to obtain, process, and analyze a variety of socially-generated data while providing a theoretical background to accurately interpret your findings. You will be shown R code and examples of data that can be used as a springboard as you get the chance to undertake your own analyses of business, social, or political data. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: ? Learning Data Mining with R by Bater Makhabel ? R Data Mining Blueprints by Pradeepta Mishra ? Social Media Mining with R by Nathan Danneman and Richard Heimann
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Chapter 2. Getting Started with R

In this chapter, we lay out the case for using R for social media mining. We then walk readers through the processes of installing, getting help for, and using R. By the end of this chapter, readers will have gained familiarity with data import/export, arithmetic, vectors, basic statistical modeling, and basic graphing using R.

Why R?

We strongly prefer using the R statistical computing environment for social data mining. This chapter highlights the benefits of using R, presents an introductory lesson on its use, and provides pointers towards further resources for learning the R language.

At its most basic, R is simply a calculator. You can ask it what 2 + 2 is, and it will provide you with 4 as the answer. However, R is more flexible than the calculator you used in high school. In fact, its flexibility leads it to be described as a statistical computing environment. As such, it comes with functions that assist us with data manipulation, statistics...