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

Using JAGS and runjags


Although it's a bit silly to break out MCMC for the single-parameter career recommendation analysis that we discussed earlier, applying this method to this simple example will aid in understanding its usage for more complicated models.

In order to get started, you need to install a software program called JAGS, which stands for Just Another Gibbs Sampler (a Gibbs sampler is a type of MCMC sampler). This program is independent of R, but we will be using R packages to communicate with it. After installing JAGS, you will need to install the R packages rjags, runjags, and modeest. As a reminder, you can install all three with this command:

 > install.packages(c("rjags", "runjags", "modeest")) 

To make sure everything is installed properly, load the runjags package, and run the function testjags(). My output looks something like this:

  > library(runjags) 
  > testjags() 
  You are using R version 3.2.1 (2015-06-18) on a unix machine, 
  with the RStudio GUI 
  The...