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)

Saving analysis for future work

R packages, especially the popular ones, are frequently updated. Although the packages go through a rigorous testing process before being accepted on CRAN, it is sometimes necessary to be able to save your work at a point in time. This comes up often during production development using R packages. Reproducibility of results are also oftentimes needed in regulated environments by regulators such as the FDA.

R provides some unique and mature capabilities to store and persist data at a point in time. To retrieve the results, all the user needs to do is simply revert to a pre-saved version of the work.

The three most popular methods of saving R work in a reproducible framework are:

  • Packrat
  • Checkpoint
  • Rocker

Packrat

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