R Data Analysis Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Working with data

In the wild, datasets come in many different formats, but each computer program expects your data to be organized in a well-defined structure.

As a result, every data science project begins with the same tasks: gather the data, view the data, clean the data, correct or change the layout of the data to make it tidy, handle missing values and outliers from the data, model the data, and evaluate the data.

With R, you can do everything from collecting your data (from the web or a database) to cleaning it, transforming it, visualizing it, modelling it, and running statistical tests on it.