Schmuller - R Projects For Dummies

R Projects For Dummies

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Copyright 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964027

ISBN: 978-1-119-44618-7; 978-1-119-44617-0 (ebk); 978-1-119-44616-3 (ebk)

If youre like me, you think the best way to learn is by doing. Dont just read about something practice it! If you want to be a builder, then build. If you want to be a writer, then write. If you want to be a carpenter, then carpenter. (Yes, that noun and verb are the same. Carpent is not a word.)

I based this book on that learning-by-doing philosophy. My objective is for you to expand your R skill set by using R to complete projects in a variety of areas, and to learn something about those areas, too.

Even with those noble intentions, a book like this one can fall into a trap. It can quickly become a cookbook: Use this package, use these functions, create a graphic and presto, youve finished a project and its time to move on.

I didnt want to write that book. Instead, beginning in (which is where the projects start), each chapter does more than just walk you through a project. First, I show you some background material about the subject area, and then (in most chapters) you work through a scaled-down project in that area to get your feet wet, and then you complete a larger project.

But a chapter doesnt end there. At the end of each chapter, youll find a Suggested Project that challenges you to apply your newly minted skills. For each of those, I supply just enough information to get you started. (Wherever necessary, I include tips about potential pitfalls.)

Along the way, youll also encounter Quick Suggested Projects. These are based on tweaks to projects youve already completed, and they present additional challenges to your growing skill set.

One more thing: Every subject area could be the basis for an entire book, so I can only scratch the surface of each one. directs you toward resources that provide more information.

Ive organized this book into six parts.

is all about R and RStudio. I discuss R functions, structures, and packages, and I show you how to create a variety of graphics.

The projects begin in , where you learn to create applications that respond to users. I discuss the shiny package for working with web browsers, and the shinydashboard package for creating dashboards.

This is the longest part of the book. I begin by telling you about the University of CaliforniaIrvine Machine Learning Repository, which provides the data sets for the projects. I also discuss the rattle package for creating machine learning applications. The projects cover decision trees, random forests, support vector machines, k-means clustering, and neural networks.

The two projects in deal with larger data sets than you encounter earlier in the book. The first project is a customer segmentation analysis of over 300,000 customers of an online retailer. A follow-up analysis applies machine learning. The second project analyzes a data set of more than 500,000 airline flights.

Two projects are in . The first is to plot the location (along with other information) of airports in one of the US states. The second shows you how to combine an animated image with a stationary one.

The first chapter in provides information about useful packages that can help you with future projects. The second tells you where to learn more about the subject areas of this book.

Any reference book throws a lot of information at you, and this one is no exception. I intended it all to be useful, but I didn't aim it all at the same level. So if you're not deeply into the subject matter, you can avoid paragraphs marked with the Technical Stuff icon, and you can also skip the sidebars.