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

Relational databases


Perhaps the most common external source of data is from relational databases. Since this section is probably of interest to only those who work with databases—or at least plan to—some knowledge of the basics of relational databases is assumed.

One way to connect to databases from R is to use the RODBC package. This allows one to access any database that implements the ODBC common interface (for example, PostgreSQL, Access, Oracle, SQLite, DB2, and so on). A more common method, for whatever reason, is to use the DBI package and DBI-compliant drivers.

DBI is an R package that defines a generalized interface for communication between different databases and R. As with ODBC, it allows the same compliant SQL to run on multiple databases. The DBI package alone is not sufficient for communicating with any particular database from R; in order to use DBI, you must also install and load a DBI-compliant driver for your particular database. Packages exist providing drivers for many...