Book Image

Hands-On Data Science with R

By : Vitor Bianchi Lanzetta, Doug Ortiz, Nataraj Dasgupta, Ricardo Anjoleto Farias
Book Image

Hands-On Data Science with R

By: Vitor Bianchi Lanzetta, Doug Ortiz, Nataraj Dasgupta, Ricardo Anjoleto Farias

Overview of this book

R is the most widely used programming language, and when used in association with data science, this powerful combination will solve the complexities involved with unstructured datasets in the real world. This book covers the entire data science ecosystem for aspiring data scientists, right from zero to a level where you are confident enough to get hands-on with real-world data science problems. The book starts with an introduction to data science and introduces readers to popular R libraries for executing data science routine tasks. This book covers all the important processes in data science such as data gathering, cleaning data, and then uncovering patterns from it. You will explore algorithms such as machine learning algorithms, predictive analytical models, and finally deep learning algorithms. You will learn to run the most powerful visualization packages available in R so as to ensure that you can easily derive insights from your data. Towards the end, you will also learn how to integrate R with Spark and Hadoop and perform large-scale data analytics without much complexity.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Preparing data for analysis

In this section, we will look at some basic characteristics of data and how to read, preprocess, and cleanse datasets. We have seen some of these aspects earlier in Chapter 3, Data Wrangling with R, and this section is intended to provide a high-level view of the relevant topics.

Data categories

Data can be broadly categorized into two types:

  • Discrete (or categorical): Any value that denotes a category is considered a discrete variable. Examples of discrete variables include most nouns such as fruits, colors, school grades, countries and genders.
  • Continuous (or quantitative): Continuous numbers are numerical quantities on which you can perform arithmetic operations. This includes variables such...