Chapter 2. Loading data into R
This chapter covers
- Understanding R’s data frame structure
- Loading data into R from files and from relational databases
- Transforming data for analysis
If your experience has been like ours, many of your data science projects start when someone points you toward a bunch of data and you’re left to make sense of it. Your first thought may be to use shell tools or spreadsheets to sort through it, but you quickly realize that you’re taking more time tinkering with the tools than actually analyzing the data. Luckily, there’s a better way. In this chapter, we’ll demonstrate how to quickly load and start working with data using R. Using R to transform data is easy because R’s main data type (the data frame) is ideal for working with structured data, and R has adapters that read data from many common data formats. In this chapter, we’ll start with small example datasets found in files and then move to datasets from relational databases. By the end of the chapter, you’ll be able to confidently use R to extract, transform, and load data for analysis.[1]