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

Other data formats


One of things that makes R great is the wealth of high-quality add-on packages. As you might expect, there are many of these add-on packages with the ability to import data in a multitude of other formats. Whether it's an arcane markup language, a proprietary binary file, Excel spreadsheet, and so on, there is almost certainly an R package out there for you to handle it. But how do you find them?

One way is to browse the community maintained CRAN Task Views (https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/). A Task View is a way to browse for packages related to a particular topic, domain, or special interest. The germane Task View, here, is the Web Technologies Task View (https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/WebTechnologies.html). You'll notice that jsonlite and the XML package are mentioned on the first page.

The easiest way to discover these packages, though, is through your favorite web browser. For example, if you are looking for a package to import YAML data (yet another data...