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Merging and Importing Data Additionalmaterial

The document provides an overview of built-in functions in R for exploring the iris dataset, including how to determine its dimensions, structure, and summary statistics. It also discusses the use of head and tail functions to view the first and last observations of the dataset. Additionally, it outlines the dependencies required for reading XML and Excel files in R, including necessary package installations on different operating systems.

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D.R.Anitha Sofia Liz CSE STAFF
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12 views2 pages

Merging and Importing Data Additionalmaterial

The document provides an overview of built-in functions in R for exploring the iris dataset, including how to determine its dimensions, structure, and summary statistics. It also discusses the use of head and tail functions to view the first and last observations of the dataset. Additionally, it outlines the dependencies required for reading XML and Excel files in R, including necessary package installations on different operating systems.

Uploaded by

D.R.Anitha Sofia Liz CSE STAFF
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Additional Material for Merging and Importing Data

Built-in functions for exploring a data frame


We will use built-in dataset iris to explore some of the useful functions in base package of R language. In
order to know the dimensions of iris, we use dim function. The output of dim function is a vector, in which
the elements represent the number of rows and number of columns, respectively.
dim(iris)

## [1] 150 5
We can also use nrow and ncol to get the number of rows and number of columns, respectively.
nrow(iris)

## [1] 150
ncol(iris)

## [1] 5
Thus, iris has 150 rows and 2 columns, which can also be verified by using str function. It also returns
many useful pieces of information, including the above information and the types of data for each column.
str(iris)

## 'data.frame': 150 obs. of 5 variables:


## $ Sepal.Length: num 5.1 4.9 4.7 4.6 5 5.4 4.6 5 4.4 4.9 ...
## $ Sepal.Width : num 3.5 3 3.2 3.1 3.6 3.9 3.4 3.4 2.9 3.1 ...
## $ Petal.Length: num 1.4 1.4 1.3 1.5 1.4 1.7 1.4 1.5 1.4 1.5 ...
## $ Petal.Width : num 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1 ...
## $ Species : Factor w/ 3 levels "setosa","versicolor",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
The first row in the output indicates that this dataset is a data frame with 150 observations of 5 variables. Also,
num denotes that the variables Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, Petal.Length and Petal.Width are numeric.
Factor denotes that the variable Species is categorical with 3 levels (setosa, versicolor, virginica).
To know the range of values inside iris, we use summary function. In particular, this function provides a
number of useful statistics including range, median and mean (Andrew Shaughnessy 2018).
summary(iris)

## Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width


## Min. :4.300 Min. :2.000 Min. :1.000 Min. :0.100
## 1st Qu.:5.100 1st Qu.:2.800 1st Qu.:1.600 1st Qu.:0.300
## Median :5.800 Median :3.000 Median :4.350 Median :1.300
## Mean :5.843 Mean :3.057 Mean :3.758 Mean :1.199
## 3rd Qu.:6.400 3rd Qu.:3.300 3rd Qu.:5.100 3rd Qu.:1.800
## Max. :7.900 Max. :4.400 Max. :6.900 Max. :2.500
## Species
## setosa :50
## versicolor:50
## virginica :50
##
##
##

1
Figure 1: Installing readxl and Rcpp

We use head to obtain the first n observations and tail to obtain the last n observations; by default, n = 6.
These are good commands for obtaining an intuitive idea of what the data look like without revealing the
entire dataset, which could have millions of rows and thousands of columns (Cai 2013).
head(iris, 2)

## Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species


## 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
tail(iris, 2)

## Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species


## 149 6.2 3.4 5.4 2.3 virginica
## 150 5.9 3.0 5.1 1.8 virginica

Dependencies for reading datasets in R


In order to read XML files in R, we need to install XML package. However, the Ubuntu package libxml2-dev
needs to be installed beforehand (Overflow 2013). On Linux operating system, open the terminal and type
the following commands.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev
Similarly, while importing Excel data in R, we need to install readxl and Rcpp. If these packages are not
installed and you try importing Excel data, a pop-up message as shown in Figure 1 will be generated. By
clicking Yes to this message, these packages can be installed.
In case you are using Windows OS, you don’t need to install these packages.

References
Andrew Shaughnessy, Elizabeth Hasenmueller, Christopher Prener. 2018. “Exploring Data in R.” https:
//cran.r-project.org/web/packages/driftR/vignettes/ExploringData.html.
Cai, Eric. 2013. “Exploratory Data Analysis: Useful R Functions for Exploring a Data Frame.” https://
chemicalstatistician.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/exploratory-data-analysis-useful-r-functions-for-exploring-a-data-frame/.
Overflow, Stack. 2013. “Unable to install R package in Ubuntu 11.04.” https://stackoverflow.com/questions/
7765429/unable-to-install-r-package-in-ubuntu-11-04.

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