Exploring and understanding data
Last updated on 2024-09-27 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 63 minutes
Overview
Questions
- How does R store and represent data?
Objectives
- Explore the structure and content of data.frames
- Understand vector types and missing data
- Use vectors as function arguments
- Create and convert factors
- Understand how R assigns values to objects
Setup
R
library(tidyverse)
library(ratdat)
The data.frame
We just spent quite a bit of time learning how to create
visualizations from the complete_old data, but we did not
talk much about what this complete_old
thing is. It’s important to understand how R thinks about, represents,
and stores data in order for us to have a productive working
relationship with R.
The complete_old data is stored in R as a
data.frame, which is the most common way that R
represents tabular data (data that can be stored in a table format, like
a spreadsheet). We can check what complete_old is by using
the class() function:
R
class(complete_old)
OUTPUT
[1] "tbl_df" "tbl" "data.frame"We can view the first few rows with the head() function,
and the last few rows with the tail() function:
R
head(complete_old)
OUTPUT
# A tibble: 6 × 13
record_id month day year plot_id species_id sex hindfoot_length weight
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr> <chr> <int> <int>
1 1 7 16 1977 2 NL M 32 NA
2 2 7 16 1977 3 NL M 33 NA
3 3 7 16 1977 2 DM F 37 NA
4 4 7 16 1977 7 DM M 36 NA
5 5 7 16 1977 3 DM M 35 NA
6 6 7 16 1977 1 PF M 14 NA
# ℹ 4 more variables: genus <chr>, species <chr>, taxa <chr>, plot_type <chr>R
tail(complete_old)
OUTPUT
# A tibble: 6 × 13
record_id month day year plot_id species_id sex hindfoot_length weight
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr> <chr> <int> <int>
1 16873 12 5 1989 8 DO M 37 51
2 16874 12 5 1989 16 RM F 18 15
3 16875 12 5 1989 5 RM M 17 9
4 16876 12 5 1989 4 DM M 37 31
5 16877 12 5 1989 11 DM M 37 50
6 16878 12 5 1989 8 DM F 37 42
# ℹ 4 more variables: genus <chr>, species <chr>, taxa <chr>, plot_type <chr>We used these functions with just one argument, the object
complete_old, and we didn’t give the argument a name, like
we often did with ggplot2. In R, a function’s arguments
come in a particular order, and if you put them in the correct order,
you don’t need to name them. In this case, the name of the argument is
x, so we can name it if we want, but since we know it’s the
first argument, we don’t need to.
To learn more about a function, you can type a ? in
front of the name of the function, which will bring up the official
documentation for that function:
R
?head
Callout
Function documentation is written by the authors of the functions, so they can vary pretty widely in their style and readability. The first section, Description, gives you a concise description of what the function does, but it may not always be enough. The Arguments section defines all the arguments for the function and is usually worth reading thoroughly. Finally, the Examples section at the end will often have some helpful examples that you can run to get a sense of what the function is doing.
Another great source of information is package
vignettes. Many packages have vignettes, which are like
tutorials that introduce the package, specific functions, or general
methods. You can run vignette(package = "package_name") to
see a list of vignettes in that package. Once you have a name, you can
run vignette("vignette_name", "package_name") to view that
vignette. You can also use a web browser to go to
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/package_name/vignettes/
where you will find a list of links to each vignette. Some packages will
have their own websites, which often have nicely formatted vignettes and
tutorials.
Finally, learning to search for help is probably the most useful
skill for any R user. The key skill is figuring out what you should
actually search for. It’s often a good idea to start your search with
R or R programming. If you have the name of a
package you want to use, start with R package_name.
Many of the answers you find will be from a website called Stack
Overflow, where people ask programming questions and others provide
answers. It is generally poor form to ask duplicate questions, so before
you decide to post your own, do some thorough searching to see if it has
been answered before (it likely has). If you do decide to post a
question on Stack Overflow, or any other help forum, you will want to
create a reproducible example or
reprex. If you are asking a complicated question
requiring your own data and a whole bunch of code, people probably won’t
be able or willing to help you. However, if you can hone in on the
specific thing you want help with, and create a minimal example using
smaller, fake data, it will be much easier for others to help you. If
you search how to make a reproducible example in R, you
will find some great resources to help you out.
Some arguments are optional. For example, the n argument
in head() specifies the number of rows to print. It
defaults to 6, but we can override that by specifying a different
number:
R
head(complete_old, n = 10)
OUTPUT
# A tibble: 10 × 13
record_id month day year plot_id species_id sex hindfoot_length weight
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr> <chr> <int> <int>
1 1 7 16 1977 2 NL M 32 NA
2 2 7 16 1977 3 NL M 33 NA
3 3 7 16 1977 2 DM F 37 NA
4 4 7 16 1977 7 DM M 36 NA
5 5 7 16 1977 3 DM M 35 NA
6 6 7 16 1977 1 PF M 14 NA
7 7 7 16 1977 2 PE F NA NA
8 8 7 16 1977 1 DM M 37 NA
9 9 7 16 1977 1 DM F 34 NA
10 10 7 16 1977 6 PF F 20 NA
# ℹ 4 more variables: genus <chr>, species <chr>, taxa <chr>, plot_type <chr>If we order them correctly, we don’t have to name either:
R
head(complete_old, 10)
OUTPUT
# A tibble: 10 × 13
record_id month day year plot_id species_id sex hindfoot_length weight
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr> <chr> <int> <int>
1 1 7 16 1977 2 NL M 32 NA
2 2 7 16 1977 3 NL M 33 NA
3 3 7 16 1977 2 DM F 37 NA
4 4 7 16 1977 7 DM M 36 NA
5 5 7 16 1977 3 DM M 35 NA
6 6 7 16 1977 1 PF M 14 NA
7 7 7 16 1977 2 PE F NA NA
8 8 7 16 1977 1 DM M 37 NA
9 9 7 16 1977 1 DM F 34 NA
10 10 7 16 1977 6 PF F 20 NA
# ℹ 4 more variables: genus <chr>, species <chr>, taxa <chr>, plot_type <chr>Additionally, if we name them, we can put them in any order we want:
R
head(n = 10, x = complete_old)
OUTPUT
# A tibble: 10 × 13
record_id month day year plot_id species_id sex hindfoot_length weight
<int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <chr> <chr> <int> <int>
1 1 7 16 1977 2 NL M 32 NA
2 2 7 16 1977 3 NL M 33 NA
3 3 7 16 1977 2 DM F 37 NA
4 4 7 16 1977 7 DM M 36 NA
5 5 7 16 1977 3 DM M 35 NA
6 6 7 16 1977 1 PF M 14 NA
7 7 7 16 1977 2 PE F NA NA
8 8 7 16 1977 1 DM M 37 NA
9 9 7 16 1977 1 DM F 34 NA
10 10 7 16 1977 6 PF F 20 NA
# ℹ 4 more variables: genus <chr>, species <chr>, taxa <chr>, plot_type <chr>Generally, it’s good practice to start with the required arguments, like the data.frame whose rows you want to see, and then to name the optional arguments. If you are ever unsure, it never hurts to explicitly name an argument.
Let’s get back to investigating our complete_old
data.frame. We can get some useful summaries of each variable using the
summary() function:
R
summary(complete_old)
OUTPUT
record_id month day year plot_id
Min. : 1 Min. : 1.000 Min. : 1.0 Min. :1977 Min. : 1.00
1st Qu.: 4220 1st Qu.: 3.000 1st Qu.: 9.0 1st Qu.:1981 1st Qu.: 5.00
Median : 8440 Median : 6.000 Median :15.0 Median :1983 Median :11.00
Mean : 8440 Mean : 6.382 Mean :15.6 Mean :1984 Mean :11.47
3rd Qu.:12659 3rd Qu.: 9.000 3rd Qu.:23.0 3rd Qu.:1987 3rd Qu.:17.00
Max. :16878 Max. :12.000 Max. :31.0 Max. :1989 Max. :24.00
species_id sex hindfoot_length weight
Length:16878 Length:16878 Min. : 6.00 Min. : 4.00
Class :character Class :character 1st Qu.:21.00 1st Qu.: 24.00
Mode :character Mode :character Median :35.00 Median : 42.00
Mean :31.98 Mean : 53.22
3rd Qu.:37.00 3rd Qu.: 53.00
Max. :70.00 Max. :278.00
NA's :2733 NA's :1692
genus species taxa plot_type
Length:16878 Length:16878 Length:16878 Length:16878
Class :character Class :character Class :character Class :character
Mode :character Mode :character Mode :character Mode :character
And, as we have already done, we can use str() to look
at the structure of an object:
R
str(complete_old)
OUTPUT
tibble [16,878 × 13] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)
$ record_id : int [1:16878] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
$ month : int [1:16878] 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 ...
$ day : int [1:16878] 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 ...
$ year : int [1:16878] 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 ...
$ plot_id : int [1:16878] 2 3 2 7 3 1 2 1 1 6 ...
$ species_id : chr [1:16878] "NL" "NL" "DM" "DM" ...
$ sex : chr [1:16878] "M" "M" "F" "M" ...
$ hindfoot_length: int [1:16878] 32 33 37 36 35 14 NA 37 34 20 ...
$ weight : int [1:16878] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
$ genus : chr [1:16878] "Neotoma" "Neotoma" "Dipodomys" "Dipodomys" ...
$ species : chr [1:16878] "albigula" "albigula" "merriami" "merriami" ...
$ taxa : chr [1:16878] "Rodent" "Rodent" "Rodent" "Rodent" ...
$ plot_type : chr [1:16878] "Control" "Long-term Krat Exclosure" "Control" "Rodent Exclosure" ...We get quite a bit of useful information here. First, we are told that we have a data.frame of 16878 observations, or rows, and 13 variables, or columns.
Next, we get a bit of information on each variable, including its
type (int or chr) and a quick peek at the
first 10 values. You might ask why there is a $ in front of
each variable. This is because the $ is an operator that
allows us to select individual columns from a data.frame.
The $ operator also allows you to use tab-completion to
quickly select which variable you want from a given data.frame. For
example, to get the year variable, we can type
complete_old$ and then hit Tab. We get a list of
the variables that we can move through with up and down arrow keys. Hit
Enter when you reach year, which should finish
this code:
R
complete_old$year
OUTPUT
[1] 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977
[16] 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977
[31] 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977
[46] 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977
[61] 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977
[76] 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977
[91] 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977 1977
[ reached getOption("max.print") -- omitted 16778 entries ]What we get back is a whole bunch of numbers, the entries in the
year column printed out in order.
Vectors: the building block of data
You might have noticed that our last result looked different from
when we printed out the complete_old data.frame itself.
That’s because it is not a data.frame, it is a vector.
A vector is a 1-dimensional series of values, in this case a vector of
numbers representing years.
Data.frames are made up of vectors; each column in a data.frame is a vector. Vectors are the basic building blocks of all data in R. Basically, everything in R is a vector, a bunch of vectors stitched together in some way, or a function. Understanding how vectors work is crucial to understanding how R treats data, so we will spend some time learning about them.
There are 4 main types of vectors (also known as atomic vectors):
"character"for strings of characters, like ourgenusorsexcolumns. Each entry in a character vector is wrapped in quotes. In other programming languages, this type of data may be referred to as “strings”."integer"for integers. All the numeric values incomplete_oldare integers. You may sometimes see integers represented like2Lor20L. TheLindicates to R that it is an integer, instead of the next data type,"numeric"."numeric", aka"double", vectors can contain numbers including decimals. Other languages may refer to these as “float” or “floating point” numbers."logical"forTRUEandFALSE, which can also be represented asTandF. In other contexts, these may be referred to as “Boolean” data.
Vectors can only be of a single type. Since each
column in a data.frame is a vector, this means an accidental character
following a number, like 29, can change the type of the
whole vector. Mixing up vector types is one of the most common mistakes
in R, and it can be tricky to figure out. It’s often very useful to
check the types of vectors.
To create a vector from scratch, we can use the c()
function, putting values inside, separated by commas.
R
c(1, 2, 5, 12, 4)
OUTPUT
[1] 1 2 5 12 4As you can see, those values get printed out in the console, just
like with complete_old$year. To store this vector so we can
continue to work with it, we need to assign it to an object.
R
num <- c(1, 2, 5, 12, 4)
You can check what kind of object num is with the
class() function.
R
class(num)
OUTPUT
[1] "numeric"We see that num is a numeric vector.
Let’s try making a character vector:
R
char <- c("apple", "pear", "grape")
class(char)
OUTPUT
[1] "character"Remember that each entry, like "apple", needs to be
surrounded by quotes, and entries are separated with commas. If you do
something like "apple, pear, grape", you will have only a
single entry containing that whole string.
Finally, let’s make a logical vector:
R
logi <- c(TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, TRUE)
class(logi)
OUTPUT
[1] "logical"Challenge 1: Coercion
Since vectors can only hold one type of data, something has to be done when we try to combine different types of data into one vector.
- What type will each of these vectors be? Try to guess without
running any code at first, then run the code and use
class()to verify your answers.
R
num_logi <- c(1, 4, 6, TRUE)
num_char <- c(1, 3, "10", 6)
char_logi <- c("a", "b", TRUE)
tricky <- c("a", "b", "1", FALSE)
R
class(num_logi)
OUTPUT
[1] "numeric"R
class(num_char)
OUTPUT
[1] "character"R
class(char_logi)
OUTPUT
[1] "character"R
class(tricky)
OUTPUT
[1] "character"R will automatically convert values in a vector so that they are all the same type, a process called coercion.
Challenge 1: Coercion (continued)
- How many values in
combined_logicalare"TRUE"(as a character)?
R
combined_logical <- c(num_logi, char_logi)
R
combined_logical
OUTPUT
[1] "1" "4" "6" "1" "a" "b" "TRUE"R
class(combined_logical)
OUTPUT
[1] "character"Only one value is "TRUE". Coercion happens when each
vector is created, so the TRUE in num_logi
becomes a 1, while the TRUE in
char_logi becomes "TRUE". When these two
vectors are combined, R doesn’t remember that the 1 in
num_logi used to be a TRUE, it will just
coerce the 1 to "1".
Challenge 1: Coercion (continued)
- Now that you’ve seen a few examples of coercion, you might have started to see that there are some rules about how types get converted. There is a hierarchy to coercion. Can you draw a diagram that represents the hierarchy of what types get converted to other types?
logical → integer → numeric → character
Logical vectors can only take on two values: TRUE or
FALSE. Integer vectors can only contain integers, so
TRUE and FALSE can be coerced to
1 and 0. Numeric vectors can contain numbers
with decimals, so integers can be coerced from, say, 6 to
6.0 (though R will still display a numeric 6
as 6.). Finally, any string of characters can be
represented as a character vector, so any of the other types can be
coerced to a character vector.
Coercion is not something you will often do intentionally; rather,
when combining vectors or reading data into R, a stray character that
you missed may change an entire numeric vector into a character vector.
It is a good idea to check the class() of your results
frequently, particularly if you are running into confusing error
messages.
Missing data
One of the great things about R is how it handles missing data, which
can be tricky in other programming languages. R represents missing data
as NA, without quotes, in vectors of any type. Let’s make a
numeric vector with an NA value:
R
weights <- c(25, 34, 12, NA, 42)
R doesn’t make assumptions about how you want to handle missing data,
so if we pass this vector to a numeric function like min(),
it won’t know what to do, so it returns NA:
R
min(weights)
OUTPUT
[1] NAThis is a very good thing, since we won’t accidentally forget to consider our missing data. If we decide to exclude our missing values, many basic math functions have an argument to remove them:
R
min(weights, na.rm = TRUE)
OUTPUT
[1] 12Vectors as arguments
A common reason to create a vector from scratch is to use in a
function argument. The quantile() function will calculate a
quantile for a given vector of numeric values. We set the quantile using
the probs argument. We also need to set
na.rm = TRUE, since there are NA values in the
weight column.
R
quantile(complete_old$weight, probs = 0.25, na.rm = TRUE)
OUTPUT
25%
24 Now we get back the 25% quantile value for weights. However, we often
want to know more than one quantile. Luckily, the probs
argument is vectorized, meaning it can take a whole
vector of values. Let’s try getting the 25%, 50% (median), and 75%
quantiles all at once.
R
quantile(complete_old$weight, probs = c(0.25, 0.5, 0.75), na.rm = TRUE)
OUTPUT
25% 50% 75%
24 42 53 While the c() function is very flexible, it doesn’t
necessarily scale well. If you want to generate a long vector from
scratch, you probably don’t want to type everything out manually. There
are a few functions that can help generate vectors.
First, putting : between two numbers will generate a
vector of integers starting with the first number and ending with the
last. The seq() function allows you to generate similar
sequences, but changing by any amount.
R
# generates a sequence of integers
1:10
OUTPUT
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10R
# with seq() you can generate sequences with a combination of:
# from: starting value
# to: ending value
# by: how much should each entry increase
# length.out: how long should the resulting vector be
seq(from = 0, to = 1, by = 0.1)
OUTPUT
[1] 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0R
seq(from = 0, to = 1, length.out = 50)
OUTPUT
[1] 0.00000000 0.02040816 0.04081633 0.06122449 0.08163265 0.10204082
[7] 0.12244898 0.14285714 0.16326531 0.18367347 0.20408163 0.22448980
[13] 0.24489796 0.26530612 0.28571429 0.30612245 0.32653061 0.34693878
[19] 0.36734694 0.38775510 0.40816327 0.42857143 0.44897959 0.46938776
[25] 0.48979592 0.51020408 0.53061224 0.55102041 0.57142857 0.59183673
[31] 0.61224490 0.63265306 0.65306122 0.67346939 0.69387755 0.71428571
[37] 0.73469388 0.75510204 0.77551020 0.79591837 0.81632653 0.83673469
[43] 0.85714286 0.87755102 0.89795918 0.91836735 0.93877551 0.95918367
[49] 0.97959184 1.00000000R
seq(from = 0, by = 0.01, length.out = 20)
OUTPUT
[1] 0.00 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08 0.09 0.10 0.11 0.12 0.13 0.14
[16] 0.15 0.16 0.17 0.18 0.19Finally, the rep() function allows you to repeat a
value, or even a whole vector, as many times as you want, and works with
any type of vector.
R
# repeats "a" 12 times
rep("a", times = 12)
OUTPUT
[1] "a" "a" "a" "a" "a" "a" "a" "a" "a" "a" "a" "a"R
# repeats this whole sequence 4 times
rep(c("a", "b", "c"), times = 4)
OUTPUT
[1] "a" "b" "c" "a" "b" "c" "a" "b" "c" "a" "b" "c"R
# repeats each value 4 times
rep(1:10, each = 4)
OUTPUT
[1] 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 6 6 6 6 7
[26] 7 7 7 8 8 8 8 9 9 9 9 10 10 10 10Challenge 2: Creating sequences
- Write some code to generate the following vector:
OUTPUT
[1] -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3R
rep(-3:3, 3)
OUTPUT
[1] -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3R
# this also works
rep(seq(from = -3, to = 3, by = 1), 3)
OUTPUT
[1] -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3R
# you might also store the sequence as an intermediate vector
my_seq <- seq(from = -3, to = 3, by = 1)
rep(my_seq, 3)
OUTPUT
[1] -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3Challenge 2: Creating sequences (continued)
- Calculate the quantiles for the
complete_oldhindfoot lengths at every 5% level (0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, etc.)
R
quantile(complete_old$hindfoot_length,
probs = seq(from = 0, to = 1, by = 0.05),
na.rm = T)
OUTPUT
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% 50% 55% 60% 65% 70% 75%
6 16 17 19 20 21 22 31 33 34 35 35 36 36 36 37
80% 85% 90% 95% 100%
37 39 49 51 70 Building with vectors
We have now seen vectors in a few different forms: as columns in a data.frame and as single vectors. However, they can be manipulated into lots of other shapes and forms. Some other common forms are:
- matrices
- 2-dimensional numeric representations
- arrays
- many-dimensional numeric
- lists
- lists are very flexible ways to store vectors
- a list can contain vectors of many different types and lengths
- an entry in a list can be another list, so lists can get deeply nested
- a data.frame is a type of list where each column is an individual vector and each vector has to be the same length, since a data.frame has an entry in every column for each row
- factors
- a way to represent categorical data
- factors can be ordered or unordered
- they often look like character vectors, but behave differently
- under the hood, they are integers with character labels, called levels, for each integer
Factors
We will spend a bit more time talking about factors, since they are
often a challenging type of data to work with. We can create a factor
from scratch by putting a character vector made using c()
into the factor() function:
R
sex <- factor(c("male", "female", "female", "male", "female", NA))
sex
OUTPUT
[1] male female female male female <NA>
Levels: female maleWe can inspect the levels of the factor using the
levels() function:
R
levels(sex)
OUTPUT
[1] "female" "male" The forcats package from the
tidyverse has a lot of convenient functions for working
with factors. We will show you a few common operations, but the
forcats package has many more useful functions.
R
library(forcats)
# change the order of the levels
fct_relevel(sex, c("male", "female"))
OUTPUT
[1] male female female male female <NA>
Levels: male femaleR
# change the names of the levels
fct_recode(sex, "M" = "male", "F" = "female")
OUTPUT
[1] M F F M F <NA>
Levels: F MR
# turn NAs into an actual factor level (useful for including NAs in plots)
fct_na_value_to_level(sex, "(Missing)")
OUTPUT
[1] male female female male female (Missing)
Levels: female male (Missing)In general, it is a good practice to leave your categorical data as a character vector until you need to use a factor. Here are some reasons you might need a factor:
- Another function requires you to use a factor
- You are plotting categorical data and want to control the ordering of categories in the plot
Since factors can behave differently from character vectors, it is always a good idea to check what type of data you’re working with. You might use a new function for the first time and be confused by the results, only to realize later that it produced a factor as an output, when you thought it was a character vector.
It is fairly straightforward to convert a factor to a character vector:
R
as.character(sex)
OUTPUT
[1] "male" "female" "female" "male" "female" NA However, you need to be careful if you’re somehow working with a factor that has numbers as its levels:
R
f_num <- factor(c(1990, 1983, 1977, 1998, 1990))
# this will pull out the underlying integers, not the levels
as.numeric(f_num)
OUTPUT
[1] 3 2 1 4 3R
# if we first convert to characters, we can then convert to numbers
as.numeric(as.character(f_num))
OUTPUT
[1] 1990 1983 1977 1998 1990Assignment, objects, and values
We’ve already created quite a few objects in R using the
<- assignment arrow, but there are a few finer details
worth talking about. First, let’s start with a quick challenge.
Challenge 3: Assignments and objects
What is the value of y after running the following
code?
R
x <- 5
y <- x
x <- 10
R
x <- 5
y <- x
x <- 10
y
OUTPUT
[1] 5Understanding what’s going on here will help you avoid a lot of
confusion when working in R. When we assign something to an object, the
first thing that happens is the righthand side gets evaluated.
The same thing happens when you run something in the console: if you
type x into the console and hit Enter, R returns
the value of x. So when we first ran the line
y <- x, x first gets evaluated to the value
of 5, and this gets assigned to y. The objects
x and y are not actually linked to each other
in any way, so when we change the value of x to
10, y is unaffected.
This also means you can run multiple nested operations, store intermediate values as separate objects, or overwrite values:
R
x <- 5
# first, x gets evaluated to 5
# then 5/2 gets evaluated to 2.5
# then sqrt(2.5) is evaluated
sqrt(x/2)
OUTPUT
[1] 1.581139R
# we can also store the evaluated value of x/2
# in an object y before passing it to sqrt()
y <- x/2
sqrt(y)
OUTPUT
[1] 1.581139R
# first, the x on the righthand side gets evaluated to 5
# then 5 gets squared
# then the resulting value is assigned to the object x
x <- x^2
x
OUTPUT
[1] 25You will be naming a of objects in R, and there are a few common naming rules and conventions:
- make names clear without being too long
-
wkgis probably too short -
weight_in_kilogramsis probably too long -
weight_kgis good
-
- names cannot start with a number
- names are case sensitive
- you cannot use the names of fundamental functions in R, like
if,else, orfor- in general, avoid using names of common functions like
c,mean, etc.
- in general, avoid using names of common functions like
- avoid dots
.in names, as they have a special meaning in R, and may be confusing to others - two common formats are
snake_caseandcamelCase - be consistent, at least within a script, ideally within a whole project
- you can use a style guide like Google’s or tidyverse’s
Key Points
- functions like
head(),str(), andsummary()are useful for exploring data.frames - most things in R are vectors, vectors stitched together, or functions
- make sure to use
class()to check vector types, especially when using new functions - factors can be useful, but behave differently from character vectors