Lecture 2

Data types, and data in R

Agenda

• Types of data
• Working with data in Rstudio
• Intro to data exploration

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Part 1
Types of data
Types of Data for Analytics

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Types of Data for Analytics

Nominal Named categories

Categorical
(qualitative)

Ordinal
Categories within implied order

Data

Discrete Only particular number

Numerical
(quantitative)

Continous Any numeric value

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Qualitative

Qualitative data - (or categorical or attribute)

Can be separated into different categories that are
distinguished by some nonnumeric characteristics.

Example: genders (male/female) of professional

athletes, States of a country etc.,

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Quantitative

Quantitative data

Numbers representing counts or

measurements

Example: Profitability of a company,

weather, time etc.,

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Exercise 1

Qualitative or Quantitative?
• Colors of automobiles in a dealer’s showroom.
• Number of seats in movie theaters.
• Classification of patients based on nursing care
needed(complete, partial, or self care)
• Lengths of newborn cats of a certain species.
• Number of complaint letters received by an airline
per month.

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Quantitative data

Working with Quantitative data

Quantitative data can further be distinguished between

discrete and continuous types.

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Discrete data

Discrete

Data result when the number of possible values is

either a finite number or a ‘countable’ number of
possible values - 0, 1, 2, 3, . . .

Example: The number of students in the class, The number

of outcomes of rolling 2 dice

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Continuous data

Continuous

Numerical data result from infinitely many possible

values that correspond to some continuous scale
that covers values without gaps.

Example: Height, Weight, Time etc.,

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Exercise 2

Discrete or continuous?

• Number of cartons of milk manufactured each

day.
• Temperatures of airplane interiors at a given
airport.
• Incomes of college students on work study
programs.
• Number of cars parked in a parking lot.
• Weights of newborn calves.
• Number of tomatoes on each plant in a field.
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Qualitative data

Working with Qualitative data

Qualitative data can be distinguished

between nominal and ordinal types.

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Nominal data

Nominal data

Characterized by data that consist of names, labels, or

categories only. The data cannot be arranged in an
ordering scheme (such as low to high), each label/category
is different.

Ex: Country/State/City, Male/Female, Yes/No etc.,

Can you convert Quantitative data to Qualitative data?
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Ordinal data

Ordinal data

Involves data that may be arranged in some order, but

differences between data values either cannot be
determined or are meaningless

Ex- Course grades, Medals – Gold/Silver/Bronze

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Exercise 3

Nominal or Ordinal

• Horsepower of motorcycle engines.

• Ratings of newscasts in Houston(poor, fair, good,
excellent)
• Temperature of automatic popcorn poppers
• Time required for drivers to complete a course
• Marital status of respondents to a survey of
savings accounts.
• Organizational hierarchy – Analyst, Manager,
Director, CEO
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Part 2
Working with data in RStudio
Hello World

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R Data types

• Character
> Strings
> Ex: “Survived” or “3.14”
• Numeric
> Integer/float/double
> Ex: 3.14/3.14L/3+14i
• Factor
> Factor is a class for categorical variable
> Factors have different levels of categories
> Ex: Survived has two levels – “Survived” and “Not Survived”
> Factors can have numeric levels too – Ex: Survived – “0” for Not
Survived and “1” for Survived
• Logical
> True/False
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Data Structures

• Vector
• List
• Factor
• Matrix
• Data frame

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R is Vectorized

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Vector

• The most basic R object is a vector

• A vector can only contain objects of the
same data type

• Empty vectors can be created with the

vector() function

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Vectors

The c() function can be used to create

vectors of objects

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Exercise - 4

Spend 5 minutes to create vectors with the following

information:

• Bob’s age – 14,

• Smith’s age – 24
• Matt’s age – 17
• Liam’ age - 19

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List

• List is a special type of vector

> Can contain elements of different classes (either basic class or compound
class)
> Each element of list can have a name

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Factor

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Matrix

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Matrix

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Data frames

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Missing values

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Coercion

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Coercion – explicit coercion

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Reading/Writing Data

• Many file formats can be imported into R.

• In this course we will only deal with either csv or xlsx.
• To read data first set working directory to the folder where
data sits.
• For csv
>{Any variable} read.csv(“filename.csv”)

There are other file formats that you can read into R but in
this course we will primarily use .csv
• For .xls files
> install.packages(“xlsx”)
> library(xlsx)
> {Variable name}  read.xlsx(“filename.xls”) 38
Data wrangling with Dplyr

• dplyr() - The dplyr package contains five

key data manipulation functions, also
called verbs:
> select() - which returns a subset of the columns,
> filter() - that is able to return a subset of the rows,
> arrange() - that reorders the rows according to single or multiple
variables,
> mutate() - used to add columns from existing data,
> summarise() - which reduces each group to a single row by calculating
aggregate measures.

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R for Business analytics

• Advantages
> Designed for Statistical Analysis
– Many built-in functions
> Large number of libraries
> Mature open source project
• Disadvantages
> Overhead (Does not scale well to very
large data)
• Use R as a “sandbox” to play with a
sample 22
Part 3
Data exploration (Intro)
Data exploration?

• Data exploration involves activities that increases

understanding on data
• No quality data, no quality predictive results!
> Quality decisions must be based on quality data
– e.g., duplicate or missing data may cause incorrect or even
misleading statistics. – Garbage in Garbage out or GIGO
> Data warehouse needs consistent integration of quality
data

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Data reduction

Variables (headers in excel file)

samples

Sample Dataset
csv or excel file

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The fundamental data problem

Program
Program

 Incomplete data
data
data
Program data
Program data Program
Program Database data
Database data

data
Program data data
data Program Interface

Program Program
Program Program

 Inaccurate data
Temporary Temporary
Database Database

Interface

Interface Interface Program

 Inconsistent data
Program
Program

data
data
Program data
Program Program data
Database Program
data
Database data
data
data data

 Unobtainable data
data
Program Program
Program Program

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Data exploration

• Data in the real world might have issues such as:

> Missing or incomplete: lacking attribute values, lacking certain

attributes of interest, or containing only aggregate data
– e.g., occupation=“ ”
> noisy: containing errors or outliers
– e.g., Salary=“-10”
> inconsistent: containing discrepancies in codes or names
– e.g., Age=“42” Birthday=“03/07/1997”
– e.g., Was rating “1,2,3”, now rating “A, B, C”
– e.g., Duplicate records

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Common exploration tools

• Drawing plots
• Using visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Cognos)
• Programming in Rstudio / Python
• Rattle package in Rstudio

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Thank You for your attention