Network Security Through Data Analysis

Chapter 6. An Introduction to R for Security Analysts

R is an open source statistical analysis package developed initially by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland. R was designed primarily by statisticians and data analysts, and is related to commercial statistical packages such as S and SPSS. R is a toolkit for exploratory data analysis; it provides statistical modeling and data manipulation capabilities, visualization, and a full-featured programming language.

R fulfills a particular utility knife-like role for analysis. Analytic work requires some tool for creating and manipulating small ad hoc databases that summarize raw data. For example, hour summaries of traffic volume from a particular host broken down by services. These tables are more complex than the raw data but are not intended for final publication—they still require more analysis. Historically, Microsoft Excel has been the workhorse application for this type of analysis. It provides numeric analysis, graphing, and a simple columnar view of data that can be filtered, sorted, and ordered. I’ve seen analysts trade Excel files around like they were scraps of paper.

I switched from Excel to R because I found it to be a superior product for large-scale numerical analysis. The graphical nature of Excel makes it clunky when you deal with significantly sized datasets. I find R’s table manipulation capabilities to be superior, it provides provenance in the form of saveable and sharable workspaces, the ...