Data Wrasstlin' in R

June 10, 2015, 3121 Snedecor

Eric Hare, erichare@iastate.edu.
Andee Kaplan, ajkaplan@iastate.edu.
Carson Sievert, cpsievert@iastate.edu.

Howdy R users! Unorganized and unruly data got you in a pickle? Come on down to the Data Wrasstlin' portion of the Week of R and we'll help you learn the tools to quickly and painlessly organize, clean, manipulate, and summarize your data. You can put the trials of manipulating data in Excel out of your mind and use your ace in the hole, the dplyr, tidyr, and stringr packages, to get your data into order in minutes. Learn how to read data in directly from Excel files and other common formats. If it takes forever to get records re-formatted from rows to columns, this is the course for you! Yeehaw!
The course will be data centric, with lots of different data sets that illustrate examples of the different techniques used for different problems.

The course will be a mix of instruction and follow-up exercises. It will be held in a computer lab but you are encouraged to bring your own laptops, with software already loaded. A list of software will be available at this site several days prior to the workshop.

Registration:

Sign-up is done through EventBrite.

Please contact Heike Hofmann (hofmann@iastate.edu) for fees in case you are not affiliated with the university.

Lectures and timetable

Date	Notes	Lecture and Resources

1:00 - 1:30	Setting Up	This will make sure that everybody's system is up and running 00-setup.R
1:30 - 2:00	Reading Files	Excel files vs text, data organization 01-files.R, midwest.csv, midwest.xls, usa.xls, Your turn solutions
2:00 - 3:10	Intro to dplyr	for-loops, intro to dplyr, summarize 03-dplyr-intro.R, PDF slides Your turn solutions
3:10 - 3:30	Break
3:30 - 4:50	More dplyr: an example	tidyr, dplyr verbs, lubridate 04-more-dplyr.R, PDF slides
4:50 - 5:00	Feedback	We very much appreciate any feedback you can give us. You can find a form here: survey.

Learning outcomes

After the end of the this one course, we expect you to be able to do the following:

Read data into R, know about different file formats
Know how to write for loops, as well as how to avoid them :).
Investigate and work with different types of objects
Working with dplyr and its variations to get summary statistics from objects.

Getting Ready on your own machine

You can bring your own laptop and work on it, if you like to. In order to keep up with everybody else, we're asking that you start installing the following pieces of software ahead of coming to the workshop:

Install R version 3.2.0 (from www.r-project.org)

Once R is installed, start the application by double-clicking the icon. Copy and paste the following commands into the R Console Window:

install.packages("ggplot2", dependencies=TRUE)
# installs a few other packages as well
install.packages("dplyr")
install.packages("tidyr")
install.packages("reshape2")
install.packages("lubridate")

Data Wrasstlin' in R

Registration:

Lectures and timetable

Learning outcomes

Getting Ready on your own machine

Useful links