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

Preface

Data Science is a vast field of study. There is so much to learn about and, every day, more and more is added to this pile. It is fascinating, for sure, the way we can analyze data and extract insights that will serve as a base for better decisions. The big companies have learned that data is what can take them to the next level of business achievement and are leading the way by building strong data science teams.

However, just data by itself is not the answer. It is like crude oil: out of it, we can make plenty of things, but just that black liquid from the ground won’t serve us very well. So, raw data is something, but when we clean, transform, and analyze it, we are transforming data into information, and that brings us the power to make better decisions.

In this book, we will go over many aspects of data wrangling, where we will learn how to transform data into knowledge for our business. Our chosen programming language is R, an amazing piece of software that was initially created as a statistical program but became much more than that. If we know what we need to achieve, getting there is just a matter of finding the right tools. Many of those tools are in this book.