R Basics Workshop (at UChicago)

20 Sep 2014

I conducted an R Workshop at the University of Chicago. This post contains the materials and code adapted from a Slidify presentation. The full presentation and code can be found on this repo.

Agenda

1. Installing and Loading Packages
2. Reading Data into R - using jsonlite package
3. Reshaping Data (Wide to Long format) - using reshape2 package
4. Data Manipulation - using dplyr package
5. Data Visualization - using ggplot2 package

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Installing Packages

• install.packages("packagename")
• library(packagename)

Exercise 1: Install and load these packages into the R environment

• httr
• jsonlite
• dplyr
• ggplot2

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Reading Data into R

• What is JSON
  • http://fx.priceonomics.com/v1/rates/
  • http://fantasy.premierleague.com/web/api/elements/1/

Exercise 2: Fetch your IP address

• URL: http://ip.jsontest.com/

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Data Manipulation

• dplyr
• Key features
  • tbl_df()
  • %>% chaining operator
  • Verbs
    • select
    • filter
    • arrange
    • mutate
    • summarise

Exercise 3a: Come up with a metric for the sports dataset and use dplyr to generate it

Exercise 3b: Explain why the metric is relevant

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Data Visualization

• ggplot2: Grammar of Graphics
  • Plots as objects
  • Layering aesthetics and options

Exercise 4: Visualize the sports dataset metric

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Summary

• Installing and Loading packages in R
• Reading data
  • read.csv
  • jsonlite package
• Data munging using dplyr
• Visualization using ggplot2
• Metrics
  • Context
  • Relevance
  • Communication

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Resources

• R, Statistics

  • Basics
    • Coursera: www.coursera.org
    • R Programming: https://www.coursera.org/course/rprog
  • Advanced
    • http://adv-r.had.co.nz/
  • R Studio: www.rstudio.com

• Visualization:

  • R Graphics Cookbook by Winston Chang
  • rCharts by Ramnath Vaidya
  • Shiny
  • FlowingData: www.flowingdata.com
  • Tableau (free for UChicago students)