Summary
Contents
Focusing on developing practical R skills rather than teaching pure statistics, Dr. Kurt Taylor Gaubatz's A Survivor's Guide to R provides a gentle yet thorough introduction to R. The book is structured around critical R tasks, and focuses on applied knowledge, rather than abstract concepts. Gaubatz's easy-to-read approach helps students with little or no background in statistics or programming to develop real-world R skills through straightforward coverage of R objects and functions. Focusing on real-world data, the challenges of dataset construction, and the use of R's powerful graphing tools, the guide is written in an accessible, sympathetic, even humorous style that ensures students acquire functional R skills they can use in their own projects and carry into their work beyond the classroom.
Data Merging and Aggregation
Data Merging and Aggregation
For beginners, data merging and data aggregation are two of the most important and yet poorly understood processes of data management. Data merging is required when we want to put together data from different data sets. Data aggregation is the process we use when we want to build a data set from summarized values of other variables.
Consider, for example, the classic challenge of studying educational outcomes. We might have data on individual school performance that we want to combine with neighborhood demographics. If these data are in different places, they will have to be appropriately merged to be amenable to analysis. Alternatively, or in addition, we might have data from several ...
