Book Image

R Programming By Example

By : Omar Trejo Navarro
Book Image

R Programming By Example

By: Omar Trejo Navarro

Overview of this book

R is a high-level statistical language and is widely used among statisticians and data miners to develop analytical applications. Often, data analysis people with great analytical skills lack solid programming knowledge and are unfamiliar with the correct ways to use R. Based on the version 3.4, this book will help you develop strong fundamentals when working with R by taking you through a series of full representative examples, giving you a holistic view of R. We begin with the basic installation and configuration of the R environment. As you progress through the exercises, you'll become thoroughly acquainted with R's features and its packages. With this book, you will learn about the basic concepts of R programming, work efficiently with graphs, create publication-ready and interactive 3D graphs, and gain a better understanding of the data at hand. The detailed step-by-step instructions will enable you to get a clean set of data, produce good visualizations, and create reports for the results. It also teaches you various methods to perform code profiling and performance enhancement with good programming practices, delegation, and parallelization. By the end of this book, you will know how to efficiently work with data, create quality visualizations and reports, and develop code that is modular, expressive, and maintainable.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Programatically finding the best model

Now that we have seen how to produce scores that represent how good or bad a model's predictive power is, you may go ahead and start specifying lots of models manually by changing the combinations of variables sent to the lm() function, compute each model's scores, and then choose the ones with the highest predictive power. This can potentially take a large amount of time, and you may want to delegate it to someone else since it's tedious work. However, fear not. There's a better way! Computers are good at repetitive and tedious tasks, and now we'll see how to tell the computer to find the best model for us with a little bit of programming.

The following sections will increase the programming level, but don't worry we'll explain the code in detail to make sure that everything is understood. If at any point...