July 2009
Beginner to intermediate
384 pages
12h 56m
English
Content preview from Beautiful Data
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Exploring the Data
There are many great tools for data analysis. Some of the most commonly used are compared in Table 17-2.
Table 17-2. Comparison of data analysis packages
Name | Advantages | Disadvantages | Open source? | Typical users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
R | Library support; visualization | Steep learning curve | Yes | Statistics |
Matlab | Elegant matrix support; visualization | Expensive; incomplete statistics support | No | Engineering |
SciPy/NumPy/Matplotlib | Python: flexible and general-purpose programming language | Components poorly integrated | Yes | Engineering |
Excel | Easy; visual; flexible | Large data sets; weak numeric and programming support | No | Business |
SAS | Very large data sets | Very baroque; hardest to learn | No | Business |
SPSS, Stata | Easy statistical analysis | Inflexible | No | Science (bio and social) |
We like to use R, which is an open source statistical and visualization programming environment with a vibrant and growing development community. It's emerged as a de facto standard among statisticians. For exploratory data analysis, we prefer it to the other options because of its graphing libraries, convenient indexing notation, and an amazing array of statistically sophisticated, community-maintained packages. You can read about it and download it at http://www.r-project.org; also look at the references at the end of this chapter.
R provides many excellent tools for looking at what's in the data. >From its interactive interpreter:
Load the data > data = read.delim("http://data.doloreslabs.com/face_scores.tsv", sep="\t") and plot. > plot(data)
Given a basic table of ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.