Analyzing and Visualizing Data with F#

Chapter 2. Analyzing Data Using F# and Deedle

In the previous chapter, we carefully picked a straightforward example that does not require too much data preprocessing and too much fiddling to find an interesting visualization to build. Life is typically not that easy, so this chapter looks at a more realistic case study. Along the way, we will add one more library to our toolbox. We will look at Deedle,¹ which is a .NET library for data and time series manipulation that is great for interactive data exploration, data alignment, and handling missing values.

In this chapter, we download a number of interesting indicators about countries of the world from the World Bank, but we do so efficiently by calling the REST service directly using an XML type provider. We align multiple data sets, fill missing values, and build two visualizations looking at CO₂ emissions and the correlation between GDP and life expectancy.

We’ll use the two libraries covered in the previous chapter (F# Data and XPlot) together with Deedle. If you’re referencing the libraries using the FsLab package as before, you’ll need the following open declarations:

#r "System.Xml.Linq.dll"
#load "packages/FsLab/FsLab.fsx"
open Deedle
open FSharp.Data
open XPlot.GoogleCharts
open XPlot.GoogleCharts.Deedle

There are two new things here. First, we need to reference the System.Xml.Linq library, which is required by the XML type provider. Next, we open the Deedle namespace together with extensions that let us pass data from ...