Book Image

Data Wrangling with R

By : Gustavo R Santos
Book Image

Data Wrangling with R

By: Gustavo R Santos

Overview of this book

In this information era, where large volumes of data are being generated every day, companies want to get a better grip on it to perform more efficiently than before. This is where skillful data analysts and data scientists come into play, wrangling and exploring data to generate valuable business insights. In order to do that, you’ll need plenty of tools that enable you to extract the most useful knowledge from data. Data Wrangling with R will help you to gain a deep understanding of ways to wrangle and prepare datasets for exploration, analysis, and modeling. This data book enables you to get your data ready for more optimized analyses, develop your first data model, and perform effective data visualization. The book begins by teaching you how to load and explore datasets. Then, you’ll get to grips with the modern concepts and tools of data wrangling. As data wrangling and visualization are intrinsically connected, you’ll go over best practices to plot data and extract insights from it. The chapters are designed in a way to help you learn all about modeling, as you will go through the construction of a data science project from end to end, and become familiar with the built-in RStudio, including an application built with Shiny dashboards. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to create your first data model and build an application with Shiny in R.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Load and Explore Data
5
Part 2: Data Wrangling
12
Part 3: Data Visualization
16
Part 4: Modeling

Preparing data for plotting

There are many kinds of graphics, for instance, univariate, bivariate with one numeric and one categorical variable or two numeric variables, and others. The input data will be different for each of them, requiring the data scientist to munge the data to fit a specific format to plot it. An example studied in this book was the data that was not in tidy format, requiring transformations before it could be plotted.

In this section, we will learn how to prepare a text to be plotted as a word cloud, which is a graphical way to show the content of text. A word cloud is a graphical representation of the most frequent words that appear in a text. The more frequently the word occurs, the bigger it appears in the plot, consequently providing a sense of the content of the text.

A text is a combination of words, but it does not have rows and columns of data. Instead, it is a whole piece. So, prior to plotting the word cloud, it is necessary to transform the...