Exploratory Data Analysis – All Blog Posts on The Chemical Statistician

This series of posts introduced various methods of exploratory data analysis, providing theoretical backgrounds and practical examples.  Fully commented and readily usable R scripts are available for all topics for you to copy and paste for your own analysis!  Most of these posts involve data visualization and plotting, and I include a lot of detail and comments on how to invoke specific plotting commands in R in these examples.

I will return to this blog post to add new links as I write more tutorials.

Useful R Functions for Exploring a Data Frame

The 5-Number Summary – Two Different Methods in R

Combining Histograms and Density Plots to Examine the Distribution of the Ozone Pollution Data from New York in R

Conceptual Foundations of Histograms – Illustrated with New York’s Ozone Pollution Data

Quantile-Quantile Plots for New York’s Ozone Pollution Data

Kernel Density Estimation and Rug Plots in R on Ozone Data in New York and Ozonopolis

2 Ways of Plotting Empirical Cumulative Distribution Functions in R

Conceptual Foundations of Empirical Cumulative Distribution Functions

Combining Box Plots and Kernel Density Plots into Violin Plots for Ozone Pollution Data

Kernel Density Estimation – Conceptual Foundations

Variations of Box Plots in R for Ozone Concentrations in New York City and Ozonopolis

Computing Descriptive Statistics in R for Data on Ozone Pollution in New York City

How to Get the Frequency Table of a Categorical Variable as a Data Frame in R

The advantages of using count() to get N-way frequency tables as data frames in R

Exploratory Data Analysis: Useful R Functions for Exploring a Data Frame

Introduction

Data in R are often stored in data frames, because they can store multiple types of data.  (In R, data frames are more general than matrices, because matrices can only store one type of data.)  Today’s post highlights some common functions in R that I like to use to explore a data frame before I conduct any statistical analysis.  I will use the built-in data set “InsectSprays” to illustrate these functions, because it contains categorical (character) and continuous (numeric) data, and that allows me to show different ways of exploring these 2 types of data.

If you have a favourite command for exploring data frames that is not in this post, please share it in the comments!

This post continues a recent series on exploratory data analysis.  Previous posts in this series include

• Descriptive statistics
• Box plots
• The conceptual foundations of kernel density estimation
• How to construct kernel density plots and rug plots in R
• Violin plots
• The conceptual foundations of empirical cumulative distribution functions (CDFs)
• 2 ways of plotting empirical CDFs in R
• Conceptual foundations of histograms and how to plot them in R
• Combining histograms and density plots in R
• The 5-number summary: Differences between fivenum() and summary() in R

Useful Functions for Exploring Data Frames

Use dim() to obtain the dimensions of the data frame (number of rows and number of columns).  The output is a vector.

> dim(InsectSprays)
[1] 72 2

Use nrow() and ncol() to get the number of rows and number of columns, respectively.  You can get the same information by extracting the first and second element of the output vector from dim(). 

> nrow(InsectSprays) 
# same as dim(InsectSprays)[1]
[1] 72
> ncol(InsectSprays)
# same as dim(InsectSprays)[2]
[1] 2

Exploratory Data Analysis: The 5-Number Summary – Two Different Methods in R

Introduction

Continuing my recent series on exploratory data analysis (EDA), today’s post focuses on 5-number summaries, which were previously mentioned in the post on descriptive statistics in this series.  I will define and calculate the 5-number summary in 2 different ways that are commonly used in R.  (It turns out that different methods arise from the lack of universal agreement among statisticians on how to calculate quantiles.)  I will show that the fivenum() function uses a simpler and more interpretable method to calculate the 5-number summary than the summary() function.  This post expands on a recent comment that I made to correct an error in the post on box plots.

> y = seq(1, 11, by = 2)
> y
[1]  1  3  5  7  9 11
> fivenum(y)
[1]  1  3  6  9 11
> summary(y)
     Min.   1st Qu.   Median    Mean     3rd Qu.    Max. 
     1.0     3.5       6.0       6.0      8.5       11.0

Why do these 2 methods of calculating the 5–number summary in R give different results?  Read the rest of this post to find out the answer!

Previous posts in this series on EDA include

• Descriptive statistics
• Box plots
• The conceptual foundations of kernel density estimation
• How to construct kernel density plots and rug plots in R
• Violin plots
• The conceptual foundations of empirical cumulative distribution functions (CDFs)
• 2 ways of plotting empirical CDFs in R
• Conceptual foundations of histograms and how to plot them in R
• Combining histograms and density plots in R