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

Visualization methods


We are now going to see how we can create these kinds of visualizations on our own.

Categorical and continuous variables

We have seen that box plots are a great way of comparing the distribution of a continuous variable across different categories. As you might expect, box plots are very easy to produce using ggplot2.

The following snippet produces the box-and-whisker plot that we saw earlier, depicting the relationship between the petal lengths of the different iris species in the iris dataset:

 library(ggplot) 
 qplot(Species, Petal.Length, data=iris, geom="boxplot",  
         fill=Species) 

First, we specify the variable on the x axis (the iris species) and then the continuous variable on the y axis (the petal length). Finally, we specify that we are using the iris dataset, that we want a box plot, and that we want to fill the boxes with different colors for each iris species.

Another fun way of comparing distributions between the different categories is using an overlapping...