Data tables are becoming an increasingly popular way of working with data sets in R. The syntax can become rather complex, but the framework is much faster and more flexible than other methods. The basic structure of a data table, though, if fairly intuitive–as it corresponds quite nicely with ...

Sometimes, when you’re analyzing a data set and you want to get a complete picture of it, you want calculate the metrics on all the observations for each variable. Let’s say, for example, that you run a small zoo and want to inventory the cost of all your ...

In my last post, we looked at how to create a correlation matrix in R. Specifically, we used data pulled from the web to see which variables were most highly correlated with an automobile’s fuel economy. Suppose, however, that we are trying to guess the fuel economy of a ...

When I first started learning R, it seemed way more complicated than what I was used to with looking at spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel. When I started working with data frames in R, it didn’t seem quite as easy to know what I was looking at. I’ve since ...

Often, when you’re working with a large data set, you will only be interested in a small portion of it for your particular analysis. So, how do you sort through all the extraneous variables and observations and extract only those you need? Well, R has several ways of doing ...

One of the most useful (and most popular) applications in R are the functions available in the dplyr package. With functions like select, filter, arrange, and mutate, you can restructure a data set to get it looking just the way you want it. The problem is that doing so can ...

So, in my last post, I showed how to create two histograms from a certain data set and then how to plot the two variables to see if there is any relationship. Visually, it was easy to tell that there was a negative relationship between the weight of an automobile ...

No matter how sophisticated you get with your statistical analysis, you’ll usually start off exploring your data the same way. If you’re looking at a single variable, you’ll want to create a histogram to look at the distribution. If you’re trying to compare two variables to ...

One of the coolest things you can do in R is write custom functions to solve your own unique problems. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to try my hand at more complex functions with loops and conditionals and such but, for now, I thought I’d share ...

I work a lot with Pivot Tables in Microsoft Excel. A problem I often encounter is trying to analyze a spreadsheet in which data from a single variable has been spread out over many columns. In particular, this happens rather frequently with longitudinal data. If you are trying to look ...