# Introduction to R and RStudio

## Overview

Teaching: 45 min
Exercises: 10 min
Questions
• How to find your way around RStudio?

• How to interact with R?

• How to manage your environment?

• How to install packages?

Objectives
• Describe the purpose and use of each pane in the RStudio IDE

• Locate buttons and options in the RStudio IDE

• Define a variable

• Assign data to a variable

• Manage a workspace in an interactive R session

• Use mathematical and comparison operators

• Call functions

• Manage packages

## Motivation

Science is a multi-step process: once you’ve designed an experiment and collected data, the real fun begins! This lesson will teach you how to start this process using R and RStudio. We will begin with raw data, perform exploratory analyses, and learn how to plot results graphically. This example starts with a dataset from gapminder.org containing population information for many countries through time. Can you read the data into R? Can you plot the population for Senegal? Can you calculate the average income for countries on the continent of Asia? By the end of these lessons you will be able to do things like plot the populations for all of these countries in under a minute!

## Before Starting The Workshop

Please ensure you have the latest version of R and RStudio installed on your machine. This is important, as some packages used in the workshop may not install correctly (or at all) if R is not up to date.

## Introduction to RStudio

Welcome to the R portion of the Software Carpentry workshop.

Throughout this lesson, we’re going to teach you some of the fundamentals of the R language as well as some best practices for organizing code for scientific projects that will make your life easier.

We’ll be using RStudio: a free, open source R Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It provides a built in editor, works on all platforms (including on servers) and provides many advantages such as integration with version control and project management.

Basic layout

When you first open RStudio, you will be greeted by three panels:

• The interactive R console/Terminal (entire left)
• Environment/History/Connections (tabbed in upper right)
• Files/Plots/Packages/Help/Viewer (tabbed in lower right)

Once you open files, such as R scripts, an editor panel will also open in the top left.

## Work flow within RStudio

There are two main ways one can work within RStudio:

1. Test and play within the interactive R console then copy code into a .R file to run later.
• This works well when doing small tests and initially starting off.
• It quickly becomes laborious
2. Start writing in a .R file and use RStudio’s short cut keys for the Run command to push the current line, selected lines or modified lines to the interactive R console.
• This is a great way to start; all your code is saved for later
• You will be able to run the file you create from within RStudio or using R’s source() function.

## Tip: Running segments of your code

RStudio offers you great flexibility in running code from within the editor window. There are buttons, menu choices, and keyboard shortcuts. To run the current line, you can

1. click on the Run button above the editor panel, or
2. select “Run Lines” from the “Code” menu, or
3. hit Ctrl+Return in Windows or Linux or +Return on OS X. (This shortcut can also be seen by hovering the mouse over the button). To run a block of code, select it and then Run. If you have modified a line of code within a block of code you have just run, there is no need to reselect the section and Run, you can use the next button along, Re-run the previous region. This will run the previous code block including the modifications you have made.

## Introduction to R

Much of your time in R will be spent in the R interactive console. This is where you will run all of your code, and can be a useful environment to try out ideas before adding them to an R script file. This console in RStudio is the same as the one you would get if you typed in R in your command-line environment.

The first thing you will see in the R interactive session is a bunch of information, followed by a “>” and a blinking cursor. In many ways this is similar to the shell environment you learned about during the shell lessons: it operates on the same idea of a “Read, evaluate, print loop”: you type in commands, R tries to execute them, and then returns a result.

## Using R as a calculator

The simplest thing you could do with R is to do arithmetic:

1 + 100

[1] 101


And R will print out the answer, with a preceding “[1]”. Don’t worry about this for now, we’ll explain that later. For now think of it as indicating output.

Like bash, if you type in an incomplete command, R will wait for you to complete it:

> 1 +

+


Any time you hit return and the R session shows a “+” instead of a “>”, it means it’s waiting for you to complete the command. If you want to cancel a command you can hit “Esc” and RStudio will give you back the “>” prompt.

## Tip: Canceling commands

If you’re using R from the command line instead of from within RStudio, you need to use Ctrl+C instead of Esc to cancel the command. This applies to Mac users as well!

Canceling a command isn’t only useful for killing incomplete commands: you can also use it to tell R to stop running code (for example if it’s taking much longer than you expect), or to get rid of the code you’re currently writing.

When using R as a calculator, the order of operations is the same as you would have learned back in school.

From highest to lowest precedence:

• Parentheses: (, )
• Exponents: ^ or **
• Multiply: *
• Divide: /
• Add: +
• Subtract: -
3 + 5 * 2

[1] 13


Use parentheses to group operations in order to force the order of evaluation if it differs from the default, or to make clear what you intend.

(3 + 5) * 2

[1] 16


This can get unwieldy when not needed, but clarifies your intentions. Remember that others may later read your code.

(3 + (5 * (2 ^ 2))) # hard to read
3 + 5 * 2 ^ 2       # clear, if you remember the rules
3 + 5 * (2 ^ 2)     # if you forget some rules, this might help


The text after each line of code is called a “comment”. Anything that follows after the hash (or octothorpe) symbol # is ignored by R when it executes code.

Really small or large numbers get a scientific notation:

2/10000

[1] 2e-04


Which is shorthand for “multiplied by 10^XX”. So 2e-4 is shorthand for 2 * 10^(-4).

You can write numbers in scientific notation too:

5e3  # Note the lack of minus here

[1] 5000


## Mathematical functions

R has many built in mathematical functions. To call a function, we can type its name, followed by open and closing parentheses. Anything we type inside the parentheses is called the function’s arguments:

sin(1)  # trigonometry functions

[1] 0.841471

log(1)  # natural logarithm

[1] 0

log10(10) # base-10 logarithm

[1] 1

exp(0.5) # e^(1/2)

[1] 1.648721


Don’t worry about trying to remember every function in R. You can look them up on Google, or if you can remember the start of the function’s name, use the tab completion in RStudio.

This is one advantage that RStudio has over R on its own, it has auto-completion abilities that allow you to more easily look up functions, their arguments, and the values that they take.

Typing a ? before the name of a command will open the help page for that command. When using RStudio, this will open the ‘Help’ pane; if using R in the terminal, the help page will open in your browser. The help page will include a detailed description of the command and how it works. Scrolling to the bottom of the help page will usually show a collection of code examples which illustrate command usage. We’ll go through an example later.

## Comparing things

We can also do comparisons in R:

1 == 1  # equality (note two equals signs, read as "is equal to")

[1] TRUE

1 != 2  # inequality (read as "is not equal to")

[1] TRUE

1 < 2  # less than

[1] TRUE

1 <= 1  # less than or equal to

[1] TRUE

1 > 0  # greater than

[1] TRUE

1 >= -9 # greater than or equal to

[1] TRUE


## Tip: Comparing Numbers

A word of warning about comparing numbers: you should never use == to compare two numbers unless they are integers (a data type which can specifically represent only whole numbers).

Computers may only represent decimal numbers with a certain degree of precision, so two numbers which look the same when printed out by R, may actually have different underlying representations and therefore be different by a small margin of error (called Machine numeric tolerance).

Instead you should use the all.equal function.

## Variables and assignment

We can store values in variables using the assignment operator <-, like this:

x <- 1/40


Notice that assignment does not print a value. Instead, we stored it for later in something called a variable. x now contains the value 0.025:

x

[1] 0.025


More precisely, the stored value is a decimal approximation of this fraction called a floating point number.

Look for the Environment tab in the top right panel of RStudio, and you will see that x and its value have appeared. Our variable x can be used in place of a number in any calculation that expects a number:

log(x)

[1] -3.688879


Notice also that variables can be reassigned:

x <- 100


x used to contain the value 0.025 and now it has the value 100.

Assignment values can contain the variable being assigned to:

x <- x + 1 #notice how RStudio updates its description of x on the top right tab
y <- x * 2


The right hand side of the assignment can be any valid R expression. The right hand side is fully evaluated before the assignment occurs.

Variable names can contain letters, numbers, underscores and periods but no spaces. They must start with a letter or a period followed by a letter (they cannot start with a number nor an underscore). Variables begining with a period are hidden variables. Different people use different conventions for long variable names, these include

• periods.between.words
• underscores_between_words
• camelCaseToSeparateWords

What you use is up to you, but be consistent.

It is also possible to use the = operator for assignment:

x = 1/40


But this is much less common among R users. The most important thing is to be consistent with the operator you use. There are occasionally places where it is less confusing to use <- than =, and it is the most common symbol used in the community. So the recommendation is to use <-.

## Challenge 1

Which of the following are valid R variable names?

min_height
max.height
_age
.mass
MaxLength
min-length
2widths
celsius2kelvin


## Solution to challenge 1

The following can be used as R variables:

min_height
max.height
MaxLength
celsius2kelvin


The following creates a hidden variable:

.mass


The following will not be able to be used to create a variable

_age
min-length
2widths


## Vectorization

One final thing to be aware of is that R is vectorized, meaning that variables and functions can have vectors as values. In contrast to physics and mathematics, a vector in R describes a set of values in a certain order of the same data type. For example

1:5

[1] 1 2 3 4 5

2^(1:5)

[1]  2  4  8 16 32

x <- 1:5
2^x

[1]  2  4  8 16 32


This is incredibly powerful; we will discuss this further in an upcoming lesson.

There are a few useful commands you can use to interact with the R session.

ls will list all of the variables and functions stored in the global environment (your working R session):

ls()

[1] "args"    "dest_md" "src_rmd" "x"       "y"


## Tip: hidden objects

Like in the shell, ls will hide any variables or functions starting with a “.” by default. To list all objects, type ls(all.names=TRUE) instead

Note here that we didn’t give any arguments to ls, but we still needed to give the parentheses to tell R to call the function.

If we type ls by itself, R prints a bunch of code instead of a listing of objects.

ls

function (name, pos = -1L, envir = as.environment(pos), all.names = FALSE,
pattern, sorted = TRUE)
{
if (!missing(name)) {
pos <- tryCatch(name, error = function(e) e)
if (inherits(pos, "error")) {
name <- substitute(name)
if (!is.character(name))
name <- deparse(name)
warning(gettextf("%s converted to character string",
sQuote(name)), domain = NA)
pos <- name
}
}
all.names <- .Internal(ls(envir, all.names, sorted))
if (!missing(pattern)) {
if ((ll <- length(grep("[", pattern, fixed = TRUE))) &&
ll != length(grep("]", pattern, fixed = TRUE))) {
if (pattern == "[") {
pattern <- "\$" warning("replaced regular expression pattern '[' by '\\\\['") } else if (length(grep("[^\\\$\\[<-", pattern))) {
pattern <- sub("\\[<-", "\\\\\\[<-", pattern)
warning("replaced '[<-' by '\\\\[<-' in regular expression pattern")
}
}
grep(pattern, all.names, value = TRUE)
}
else all.names
}
<bytecode: 0x5625fa5d9a98>
<environment: namespace:base>


What’s going on here?

Like everything in R, ls is the name of an object, and entering the name of an object by itself prints the contents of the object. The object x that we created earlier contains 1, 2, 3, 4, 5:

x

[1] 1 2 3 4 5


The object ls contains the R code that makes the ls function work! We’ll talk more about how functions work and start writing our own later.

You can use rm to delete objects you no longer need:

rm(x)


If you have lots of things in your environment and want to delete all of them, you can pass the results of ls to the rm function:

rm(list = ls())


In this case we’ve combined the two. Like the order of operations, anything inside the innermost parentheses is evaluated first, and so on.

In this case we’ve specified that the results of ls should be used for the list argument in rm. When assigning values to arguments by name, you must use the = operator!!

If instead we use <-, there will be unintended side effects, or you may get an error message:

rm(list <- ls())

Error in rm(list <- ls()): ... must contain names or character strings


## Tip: Warnings vs. Errors

Pay attention when R does something unexpected! Errors, like above, are thrown when R cannot proceed with a calculation. Warnings on the other hand usually mean that the function has run, but it probably hasn’t worked as expected.

In both cases, the message that R prints out usually give you clues how to fix a problem.

## R Packages

It is possible to add functions to R by writing a package, or by obtaining a package written by someone else. As of this writing, there are over 10,000 packages available on CRAN (the comprehensive R archive network). R and RStudio have functionality for managing packages:

• You can see what packages are installed by typing installed.packages()
• You can install packages by typing install.packages("packagename"), where packagename is the package name, in quotes.
• You can update installed packages by typing update.packages()
• You can remove a package with remove.packages("packagename")
• You can make a package available for use with library(packagename)

Packages can also be viewed, loaded, and detached in the Packages tab of the lower right panel in RStudio. Clicking on this tab will displas all of installed packages with a checkbox next to them. If the box next to a package name is checked, the package is loaded and if it is empty, the package is not loaded. Click an empty box to load that package and click a checked box to detach that package.

Packages can be installed and updated from the Package tab with the Install and Update buttons at the top of the tab.

## Challenge 2

What will be the value of each variable after each statement in the following program?

mass <- 47.5
age <- 122
mass <- mass * 2.3
age <- age - 20


## Solution to challenge 2

mass <- 47.5


This will give a value of 47.5 for the variable mass

age <- 122


This will give a value of 122 for the variable age

mass <- mass * 2.3


This will multiply the existing value of 47.5 by 2.3 to give a new value of 109.25 to the variable mass.

age <- age - 20


This will subtract 20 from the existing value of 122 to give a new value of 102 to the variable age.

## Challenge 3

Run the code from the previous challenge, and write a command to compare mass to age. Is mass larger than age?

## Solution to challenge 3

One way of answering this question in R is to use the > to set up the following:

mass > age

[1] TRUE


This should yield a boolean value of TRUE since 109.25 is greater than 102.

## Challenge 4

Clean up your working environment by deleting the mass and age variables.

## Solution to challenge 4

We can use the rm command to accomplish this task

rm(age, mass)


## Challenge 5

Install the following packages: ggplot2, plyr, gapminder

## Solution to challenge 5

We can use the install.packages() command to install the required packages.

install.packages("ggplot2")
install.packages("plyr")
install.packages("gapminder")


An alternate solution, to install multiple packages with a single install.packages() command is:

install.packages(c("ggplot2", "plyr", "gapminder"))


## Key Points

• Use RStudio to write and run R programs.

• R has the usual arithmetic operators and mathematical functions.

• Use <- to assign values to variables.

• Use ls() to list the variables in a program.

• Use rm() to delete objects in a program.

• Use install.packages() to install packages (libraries).

# Project Management With RStudio

## Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 10 min
Questions
• How can I manage my projects in R?

Objectives
• Create self-contained projects in RStudio

## Introduction

The scientific process is naturally incremental, and many projects start life as random notes, some code, then a manuscript, and eventually everything is a bit mixed together.

Most people tend to organize their projects like this:

There are many reasons why we should ALWAYS avoid this:

1. It is really hard to tell which version of your data is the original and which is the modified;
2. It gets really messy because it mixes files with various extensions together;
3. It probably takes you a lot of time to actually find things, and relate the correct figures to the exact code that has been used to generate it;

A good project layout will ultimately make your life easier:

• It will help ensure the integrity of your data;
• It makes it simpler to share your code with someone else (a lab-mate, collaborator, or supervisor);
• It makes it easier to pick the project back up after a break.

## A possible solution

One of the most powerful and useful aspects of RStudio is its project management functionality. We’ll be using this today to create a self-contained, reproducible project.

## Challenge 1: Creating a self-contained project

We’re going to create a new project in RStudio:

1. Click the “File” menu button, then “New Project”.
2. Click “New Directory”.
3. Click “New Project”.
4. Type in the name of the directory to store your project, e.g. “my_project”.
5. If available, select the checkbox for “Create a git repository.”
6. Click the “Create Project” button.

The simplest way to open an RStudio project once it has been created is to click through your file system to get to the directory where it was saved and double click on the .Rproj file. This will open RStudio and start your R session in the same directory as the .Rproj file. All your data, plots and scripts will now be relative to the project directory. RStudio projects have the added benefit of allowing you to open multiple projects at the same time each open to its own project directory. This allows you to keep multiple projects open without them interfering with each other.

## Challenge 2: Opening an RStudio project through the file system

1. Exit RStudio.
2. Navigate to the directory where you created a project in Challenge 1.
3. Double click on the .Rproj file in that directory.

## Best practices for project organization

Although there is no “best” way to lay out a project, there are some general principles to adhere to that will make project management easier:

### Treat data as read only

This is probably the most important goal of setting up a project. Data is typically time consuming and/or expensive to collect. Working with them interactively (e.g., in Excel) where they can be modified means you are never sure of where the data came from, or how it has been modified since collection. It is therefore a good idea to treat your data as “read-only”.

### Data Cleaning

In many cases your data will be “dirty”: it will need significant preprocessing to get into a format R (or any other programming language) will find useful. This task is sometimes called “data munging”. Storing these scripts in a separate folder, and creating a second “read-only” data folder to hold the “cleaned” data sets can prevent confusion between the two sets.

### Treat generated output as disposable

Anything generated by your scripts should be treated as disposable: it should all be able to be regenerated from your scripts.

There are lots of different ways to manage this output. Having an output folder with different sub-directories for each separate analysis makes it easier later. Since many analyses are exploratory and don’t end up being used in the final project, and some of the analyses get shared between projects.

## Tip: Good Enough Practices for Scientific Computing

Good Enough Practices for Scientific Computing gives the following recommendations for project organization:

1. Put each project in its own directory, which is named after the project.
2. Put text documents associated with the project in the doc directory.
3. Put raw data and metadata in the data directory, and files generated during cleanup and analysis in a results directory.
4. Put source for the project’s scripts and programs in the src directory, and programs brought in from elsewhere or compiled locally in the bin directory.
5. Name all files to reflect their content or function.

### Separate function definition and application

One of the more effective ways to work with R is to start by writing the code you want to run directly in a .R script, and then running the selected lines (either using the keyboard shortcuts in RStudio or clicking the “Run” button) in the interactive R console.

When your project is in its early stages, the initial .R script file usually contains many lines of directly executed code. As it matures, reusable chunks get pulled into their own functions. It’s a good idea to separate these functions into two separate folders; one to store useful functions that you’ll reuse across analyses and projects, and one to store the analysis scripts.

## Tip: avoiding duplication

You may find yourself using data or analysis scripts across several projects. Typically you want to avoid duplication to save space and avoid having to make updates to code in multiple places.

In this case, making “symbolic links”, which are essentially shortcuts to files somewhere else on a filesystem, can let you use existing code without having to move or copy it. Plus, any changes made to that code will only have to be made once.

On Linux and OS X you can use the ln -s command, and on Windows you can either create a shortcut or use the mklink command from the windows terminal.

### Save the data in the data directory

Now we have a good directory structure we will now place/save the data file in the data/ directory.

## Challenge 3

1. Download the file (CTRL + S, right mouse click -> “Save as”, or File -> “Save page as”)
2. Make sure it’s saved under the name gapminder_data.csv
3. Save the file in the data/ folder within your project.

We will load and inspect these data later.

## Challenge 4

It is useful to get some general idea about the dataset, directly from the command line, before loading it into R. Understanding the dataset better will come in handy when making decisions on how to load it in R. Use the command-line shell to answer the following questions:

1. What is the size of the file?
2. How many rows of data does it contain?
3. What kinds of values are stored in this file?

## Solution to Challenge 4

By running these commands in the shell:

ls -lh data/gapminder_data.csv

-rw-r--r-- 1 runner docker 80K Jan 26 00:12 data/gapminder_data.csv


The file size is 80K.

wc -l data/gapminder_data.csv

1705 data/gapminder_data.csv


There are 1705 lines. The data looks like:

head data/gapminder_data.csv

country,year,pop,continent,lifeExp,gdpPercap
Afghanistan,1952,8425333,Asia,28.801,779.4453145
Afghanistan,1957,9240934,Asia,30.332,820.8530296
Afghanistan,1962,10267083,Asia,31.997,853.10071
Afghanistan,1967,11537966,Asia,34.02,836.1971382
Afghanistan,1972,13079460,Asia,36.088,739.9811058
Afghanistan,1977,14880372,Asia,38.438,786.11336
Afghanistan,1982,12881816,Asia,39.854,978.0114388
Afghanistan,1987,13867957,Asia,40.822,852.3959448
Afghanistan,1992,16317921,Asia,41.674,649.3413952


## Tip: command line in RStudio

The Terminal tab in the console pane provides a convenient place directly within RStudio to interact directly with the command line.

### Version Control

It is important to use version control with projects. Go here for a good lesson which describes using Git with RStudio.

## Key Points

• Use RStudio to create and manage projects with consistent layout.

• Treat raw data as read-only.

• Treat generated output as disposable.

• Separate function definition and application.

# Seeking Help

## Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 10 min
Questions
• How can I get help in R?

Objectives
• To be able read R help files for functions and special operators.

• To be able to use CRAN task views to identify packages to solve a problem.

• To be able to seek help from your peers.

R, and every package, provide help files for functions. The general syntax to search for help on any function, “function_name”, from a specific function that is in a package loaded into your namespace (your interactive R session):

?function_name
help(function_name)


This will load up a help page in RStudio (or as plain text in R by itself).

Each help page is broken down into sections:

• Description: An extended description of what the function does.
• Usage: The arguments of the function and their default values.
• Arguments: An explanation of the data each argument is expecting.
• Details: Any important details to be aware of.
• Value: The data the function returns.
• Examples: Some examples for how to use the function.

Different functions might have different sections, but these are the main ones you should be aware of.

## Tip: Running Examples

From within the function help page, you can highlight code in the Examples and hit Ctrl+Return to run it in RStudio console. This is gives you a quick way to get a feel for how a function works.

One of the most daunting aspects of R is the large number of functions available. It would be prohibitive, if not impossible to remember the correct usage for every function you use. Luckily, the help files mean you don’t have to!

## Special Operators

To seek help on special operators, use quotes:

?"<-"


## Getting help on packages

Many packages come with “vignettes”: tutorials and extended example documentation. Without any arguments, vignette() will list all vignettes for all installed packages; vignette(package="package-name") will list all available vignettes for package-name, and vignette("vignette-name") will open the specified vignette.

If a package doesn’t have any vignettes, you can usually find help by typing help("package-name").

## When you kind of remember the function

If you’re not sure what package a function is in, or how it’s specifically spelled you can do a fuzzy search:

??function_name


A fuzzy search is when you search for an approximate string match. For example, you may remember that the function to set your working directory includes “set” in its name. You can do a fuzzy search to help you identify the function:

??set


## When you have no idea where to begin

If you don’t know what function or package you need to use CRAN Task Views is a specially maintained list of packages grouped into fields. This can be a good starting point.

If you’re having trouble using a function, 9 times out of 10, the answers you are seeking have already been answered on Stack Overflow. You can search using the [r] tag.

?dput


Will dump the data you’re working with into a format so that it can be copy and pasted by anyone else into their R session.

sessionInfo()

R version 4.0.3 (2020-10-10)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas/libblas.so.3
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopenblasp-r0.2.20.so

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C           LC_TIME=C.UTF-8
[4] LC_COLLATE=C.UTF-8     LC_MONETARY=C.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=C.UTF-8
[10] LC_TELEPHONE=C         LC_MEASUREMENT=C.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] knitr_1.30

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.0.3 magrittr_2.0.1 tools_4.0.3    stringi_1.5.3  stringr_1.4.0
[6] xfun_0.20      evaluate_0.14


Will print out your current version of R, as well as any packages you have loaded. This can be useful for others to help reproduce and debug your issue.

## Challenge 1

Look at the help for the c function. What kind of vector do you expect you will create if you evaluate the following:

c(1, 2, 3)
c('d', 'e', 'f')
c(1, 2, 'f')


## Solution to Challenge 1

The c() function creates a vector, in which all elements are the same type. In the first case, the elements are numeric, in the second, they are characters, and in the third they are characters: the numeric values are “coerced” to be characters.

## Challenge 2

Look at the help for the paste function. You’ll need to use this later. What is the difference between the sep and collapse arguments?

## Solution to Challenge 2

To look at the help for the paste() function, use:

help("paste")
?paste


The difference between sep and collapse is a little tricky. The paste function accepts any number of arguments, each of which can be a vector of any length. The sep argument specifies the string used between concatenated terms — by default, a space. The result is a vector as long as the longest argument supplied to paste. In contrast, collapse specifies that after concatenation the elements are collapsed together using the given separator, the result being a single string. e.g.

paste(c("a","b"), "c")

[1] "a c" "b c"

paste(c("a","b"), "c", sep = ",")

[1] "a,c" "b,c"

paste(c("a","b"), "c", collapse = "|")

[1] "a c|b c"

paste(c("a","b"), "c", sep = ",", collapse = "|")

[1] "a,c|b,c"


(For more information, scroll to the bottom of the ?paste help page and look at the examples, or try example('paste').)

## Challenge 3

Use help to find a function (and its associated parameters) that you could use to load data from a tabular file in which columns are delimited with “\t” (tab) and the decimal point is a “.” (period). This check for decimal separator is important, especially if you are working with international colleagues, because different countries have different conventions for the decimal point (i.e. comma vs period). hint: use ??"read table" to look up functions related to reading in tabular data.

## Solution to Challenge 3

The standard R function for reading tab-delimited files with a period decimal separator is read.delim(). You can also do this with read.table(file, sep="\t") (the period is the default decimal separator for read.table(), although you may have to change the comment.char argument as well if your data file contains hash (#) characters

## Key Points

• Use help() to get online help in R.

# Data Structures

## Overview

Teaching: 40 min
Exercises: 15 min
Questions
• How can I read data in R?

• What are the basic data types in R?

• How do I represent categorical information in R?

Objectives
• To be able to identify the 5 main data types.

• To begin exploring data frames, and understand how they are related to vectors, factors and lists.

• To be able to ask questions from R about the type, class, and structure of an object.

One of R’s most powerful features is its ability to deal with tabular data - such as you may already have in a spreadsheet or a CSV file. Let’s start by making a toy dataset in your data/ directory, called feline-data.csv:

cats <- data.frame(coat = c("calico", "black", "tabby"),
weight = c(2.1, 5.0, 3.2),
likes_string = c(1, 0, 1))
write.csv(x = cats, file = "data/feline-data.csv", row.names = FALSE)


The contents of the new file, feline-data.csv:

coat,weight,likes_string
calico,2.1,1
black,5.0,0
tabby,3.2,1


## Tip: Editing Text files in R

Alternatively, you can create data/feline-data.csv using a text editor (Nano), or within RStudio with the File -> New File -> Text File menu item.

We can load this into R via the following:

cats <- read.csv(file = "data/feline-data.csv", stringsAsFactors = TRUE)
cats

    coat weight likes_string
1 calico    2.1            1
2  black    5.0            0
3  tabby    3.2            1


The read.table function is used for reading in tabular data stored in a text file where the columns of data are separated by punctuation characters such as CSV files (csv = comma-separated values). Tabs and commas are the most common punctuation characters used to separate or delimit data points in csv files. For convenience R provides 2 other versions of read.table. These are: read.csv for files where the data are separated with commas and read.delim for files where the data are separated with tabs. Of these three functions read.csv is the most commonly used. If needed it is possible to override the default delimiting punctuation marks for both read.csv and read.delim.

We can begin exploring our dataset right away, pulling out columns by specifying them using the $ operator: cats$weight

[1] 2.1 5.0 3.2

cats$coat  [1] calico black tabby Levels: black calico tabby  We can do other operations on the columns: ## Say we discovered that the scale weighs two Kg light: cats$weight + 2

[1] 4.1 7.0 5.2

paste("My cat is", cats$coat)  [1] "My cat is calico" "My cat is black" "My cat is tabby"  But what about cats$weight + cats$coat  Warning in Ops.factor(cats$weight, cats$coat): '+' not meaningful for factors  [1] NA NA NA  Understanding what happened here is key to successfully analyzing data in R. ## Data Types If you guessed that the last command will return an error because 2.1 plus "black" is nonsense, you’re right - and you already have some intuition for an important concept in programming called data types. We can ask what type of data something is: typeof(cats$weight)

[1] "double"


There are 5 main types: double, integer, complex, logical and character.

typeof(3.14)

[1] "double"

typeof(1L) # The L suffix forces the number to be an integer, since by default R uses float numbers

[1] "integer"

typeof(1+1i)

[1] "complex"

typeof(TRUE)

[1] "logical"

typeof('banana')

[1] "character"


No matter how complicated our analyses become, all data in R is interpreted as one of these basic data types. This strictness has some really important consequences.

A user has added details of another cat. This information is in the file data/feline-data_v2.csv.

file.show("data/feline-data_v2.csv")

coat,weight,likes_string
calico,2.1,1
black,5.0,0
tabby,3.2,1
tabby,2.3 or 2.4,1


Load the new cats data like before, and check what type of data we find in the weight column:

cats <- read.csv(file="data/feline-data_v2.csv", stringsAsFactors = TRUE)
typeof(cats$weight)  [1] "integer"  Oh no, our weights aren’t the double type anymore! If we try to do the same math we did on them before, we run into trouble: cats$weight + 2

Warning in Ops.factor(cats$weight, 2): '+' not meaningful for factors  [1] NA NA NA NA  What happened? When R reads a csv file into one of these tables, it insists that everything in a column be the same basic type; if it can’t understand everything in the column as a double, then nobody in the column gets to be a double. The table that R loaded our cats data into is something called a data.frame, and it is our first example of something called a data structure - that is, a structure which R knows how to build out of the basic data types. We can see that it is a data.frame by calling the class function on it: class(cats)  [1] "data.frame"  In order to successfully use our data in R, we need to understand what the basic data structures are, and how they behave. For now, let’s remove that extra line from our cats data and reload it, while we investigate this behavior further: feline-data.csv: coat,weight,likes_string calico,2.1,1 black,5.0,0 tabby,3.2,1  And back in RStudio: cats <- read.csv(file="data/feline-data.csv", stringsAsFactors = TRUE)  ## Vectors and Type Coercion To better understand this behavior, let’s meet another of the data structures: the vector. my_vector <- vector(length = 3) my_vector  [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE  A vector in R is essentially an ordered list of things, with the special condition that everything in the vector must be the same basic data type. If you don’t choose the datatype, it’ll default to logical; or, you can declare an empty vector of whatever type you like. another_vector <- vector(mode='character', length=3) another_vector  [1] "" "" ""  You can check if something is a vector: str(another_vector)   chr [1:3] "" "" ""  The somewhat cryptic output from this command indicates the basic data type found in this vector - in this case chr, character; an indication of the number of things in the vector - actually, the indexes of the vector, in this case [1:3]; and a few examples of what’s actually in the vector - in this case empty character strings. If we similarly do str(cats$weight)

 num [1:3] 2.1 5 3.2


we see that cats$weight is a vector, too - the columns of data we load into R data.frames are all vectors, and that’s the root of why R forces everything in a column to be the same basic data type. ## Discussion 1 Why is R so opinionated about what we put in our columns of data? How does this help us? ## Discussion 1 By keeping everything in a column the same, we allow ourselves to make simple assumptions about our data; if you can interpret one entry in the column as a number, then you can interpret all of them as numbers, so we don’t have to check every time. This consistency is what people mean when they talk about clean data; in the long run, strict consistency goes a long way to making our lives easier in R. You can also make vectors with explicit contents with the combine function: combine_vector <- c(2,6,3) combine_vector  [1] 2 6 3  Given what we’ve learned so far, what do you think the following will produce? quiz_vector <- c(2,6,'3')  This is something called type coercion, and it is the source of many surprises and the reason why we need to be aware of the basic data types and how R will interpret them. When R encounters a mix of types (here numeric and character) to be combined into a single vector, it will force them all to be the same type. Consider: coercion_vector <- c('a', TRUE) coercion_vector  [1] "a" "TRUE"  another_coercion_vector <- c(0, TRUE) another_coercion_vector  [1] 0 1  The coercion rules go: logical -> integer -> numeric -> complex -> character, where -> can be read as are transformed into. You can try to force coercion against this flow using the as. functions: character_vector_example <- c('0','2','4') character_vector_example  [1] "0" "2" "4"  character_coerced_to_numeric <- as.numeric(character_vector_example) character_coerced_to_numeric  [1] 0 2 4  numeric_coerced_to_logical <- as.logical(character_coerced_to_numeric) numeric_coerced_to_logical  [1] FALSE TRUE TRUE  As you can see, some surprising things can happen when R forces one basic data type into another! Nitty-gritty of type coercion aside, the point is: if your data doesn’t look like what you thought it was going to look like, type coercion may well be to blame; make sure everything is the same type in your vectors and your columns of data.frames, or you will get nasty surprises! But coercion can also be very useful! For example, in our cats data likes_string is numeric, but we know that the 1s and 0s actually represent TRUE and FALSE (a common way of representing them). We should use the logical datatype here, which has two states: TRUE or FALSE, which is exactly what our data represents. We can ‘coerce’ this column to be logical by using the as.logical function: cats$likes_string

[1] 1 0 1

cats$likes_string <- as.logical(cats$likes_string)
cats$likes_string  [1] TRUE FALSE TRUE  The combine function, c(), will also append things to an existing vector: ab_vector <- c('a', 'b') ab_vector  [1] "a" "b"  combine_example <- c(ab_vector, 'SWC') combine_example  [1] "a" "b" "SWC"  You can also make series of numbers: mySeries <- 1:10 mySeries   [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  seq(10)   [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  seq(1,10, by=0.1)   [1] 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 [16] 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 [31] 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 [46] 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 [61] 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 [76] 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 [91] 10.0  We can ask a few questions about vectors: sequence_example <- seq(10) head(sequence_example, n=2)  [1] 1 2  tail(sequence_example, n=4)  [1] 7 8 9 10  length(sequence_example)  [1] 10  class(sequence_example)  [1] "integer"  typeof(sequence_example)  [1] "integer"  Finally, you can give names to elements in your vector: my_example <- 5:8 names(my_example) <- c("a", "b", "c", "d") my_example  a b c d 5 6 7 8  names(my_example)  [1] "a" "b" "c" "d"  ## Challenge 1 Start by making a vector with the numbers 1 through 26. Multiply the vector by 2, and give the resulting vector names A through Z (hint: there is a built in vector called LETTERS) ## Solution to Challenge 1 x <- 1:26 x <- x * 2 names(x) <- LETTERS  ## Data Frames We said that columns in data.frames were vectors: str(cats$weight)

 num [1:3] 2.1 5 3.2

str(cats$likes_string)   logi [1:3] TRUE FALSE TRUE  These make sense. But what about str(cats$coat)

 Factor w/ 3 levels "black","calico",..: 2 1 3


## Tip: Renaming data frame columns

Data frames have column names, which can be accessed with the names() function.

names(cats)

[1] "coat"         "weight"       "likes_string"


If you want to rename the second column of cats, you can assign a new name to the second element of names(cats).

names(cats)[2] <- "weight_kg"
cats

    coat weight_kg likes_string
1 calico       2.1         TRUE
2  black       5.0        FALSE
3  tabby       3.2         TRUE


## Factors

Another important data structure is called a factor. Factors usually look like character data, but are typically used to represent categorical information. For example, let’s make a vector of strings labelling cat colorations for all the cats in our study:

coats <- c('tabby', 'tortoiseshell', 'tortoiseshell', 'black', 'tabby')
coats

[1] "tabby"         "tortoiseshell" "tortoiseshell" "black"
[5] "tabby"

str(coats)

 chr [1:5] "tabby" "tortoiseshell" "tortoiseshell" "black" "tabby"


We can turn a vector into a factor like so:

CATegories <- factor(coats)
class(CATegories)

[1] "factor"

str(CATegories)

 Factor w/ 3 levels "black","tabby",..: 2 3 3 1 2


Now R has noticed that there are three possible categories in our data - but it also did something surprising; instead of printing out the strings we gave it, we got a bunch of numbers instead. R has replaced our human-readable categories with numbered indices under the hood, this is necessary as many statistical calculations utilise such numerical representations for categorical data:

typeof(coats)

[1] "character"

typeof(CATegories)

[1] "integer"


## Challenge 2

Is there a factor in our cats data.frame? what is its name? Try using ?read.csv to figure out how to keep text columns as character vectors instead of factors; then write a command or two to show that the factor in cats is actually a character vector when loaded in this way.

## Solution to Challenge 2

One solution is use the argument stringAsFactors:

cats <- read.csv(file="data/feline-data.csv", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
str(cats$coat)  Another solution is use the argument colClasses that allow finer control. cats <- read.csv(file="data/feline-data.csv", colClasses=c(NA, NA, "character")) str(cats$coat)


Note: new students find the help files difficult to understand; make sure to let them know that this is typical, and encourage them to take their best guess based on semantic meaning, even if they aren’t sure.

In modelling functions, it’s important to know what the baseline levels are. This is assumed to be the first factor, but by default factors are labelled in alphabetical order. You can change this by specifying the levels:

mydata <- c("case", "control", "control", "case")
factor_ordering_example <- factor(mydata, levels = c("control", "case"))
str(factor_ordering_example)

 Factor w/ 2 levels "control","case": 2 1 1 2


In this case, we’ve explicitly told R that “control” should be represented by 1, and “case” by 2. This designation can be very important for interpreting the results of statistical models!

## Lists

Another data structure you’ll want in your bag of tricks is the list. A list is simpler in some ways than the other types, because you can put anything you want in it:

list_example <- list(1, "a", TRUE, 1+4i)
list_example

[[1]]
[1] 1

[[2]]
[1] "a"

[[3]]
[1] TRUE

[[4]]
[1] 1+4i

another_list <- list(title = "Numbers", numbers = 1:10, data = TRUE )
another_list

$title [1] "Numbers"$numbers
[1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

$data [1] TRUE  We can now understand something a bit surprising in our data.frame; what happens if we run: typeof(cats)  [1] "list"  We see that data.frames look like lists ‘under the hood’ - this is because a data.frame is really a list of vectors and factors, as they have to be - in order to hold those columns that are a mix of vectors and factors, the data.frame needs something a bit more flexible than a vector to put all the columns together into a familiar table. In other words, a data.frame is a special list in which all the vectors must have the same length. In our cats example, we have an integer, a double and a logical variable. As we have seen already, each column of data.frame is a vector. cats$coat

[1] calico black  tabby
Levels: black calico tabby

cats[,1]

[1] calico black  tabby
Levels: black calico tabby

typeof(cats[,1])

[1] "integer"

str(cats[,1])

 Factor w/ 3 levels "black","calico",..: 2 1 3


Each row is an observation of different variables, itself a data.frame, and thus can be composed of elements of different types.

cats[1,]

    coat weight likes_string
1 calico    2.1            1

typeof(cats[1,])

[1] "list"

str(cats[1,])

'data.frame':	1 obs. of  3 variables:
$coat : Factor w/ 3 levels "black","calico",..: 2$ weight      : num 2.1
$likes_string: num 1  ## Challenge 3 There are several subtly different ways to call variables, observations and elements from data.frames: • cats[1] • cats[[1]] • cats$coat
• cats["coat"]
• cats[1, 1]
• cats[, 1]
• cats[1, ]

Try out these examples and explain what is returned by each one.

Hint: Use the function typeof() to examine what is returned in each case.

## Solution to Challenge 3

cats[1]

    coat
1 calico
2  black
3  tabby


We can think of a data frame as a list of vectors. The single brace [1] returns the first slice of the list, as another list. In this case it is the first column of the data frame.

cats[[1]]

[1] calico black  tabby
Levels: black calico tabby


The double brace [[1]] returns the contents of the list item. In this case it is the contents of the first column, a vector of type factor.

cats$coat  [1] calico black tabby Levels: black calico tabby  This example uses the $ character to address items by name. coat is the first column of the data frame, again a vector of type factor.

cats["coat"]

    coat
1 calico
2  black
3  tabby


Here we are using a single brace ["coat"] replacing the index number with the column name. Like example 1, the returned object is a list.

cats[1, 1]

[1] calico
Levels: black calico tabby


This example uses a single brace, but this time we provide row and column coordinates. The returned object is the value in row 1, column 1. The object is an integer but because it is part of a vector of type factor, R displays the label “calico” associated with the integer value.

cats[, 1]

[1] calico black  tabby
Levels: black calico tabby


Like the previous example we use single braces and provide row and column coordinates. The row coordinate is not specified, R interprets this missing value as all the elements in this column vector.

cats[1, ]

    coat weight likes_string
1 calico    2.1            1


Again we use the single brace with row and column coordinates. The column coordinate is not specified. The return value is a list containing all the values in the first row.

## Matrices

Last but not least is the matrix. We can declare a matrix full of zeros:

matrix_example <- matrix(0, ncol=6, nrow=3)
matrix_example

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,]    0    0    0    0    0    0
[2,]    0    0    0    0    0    0
[3,]    0    0    0    0    0    0


And similar to other data structures, we can ask things about our matrix:

class(matrix_example)

[1] "matrix" "array"

typeof(matrix_example)

[1] "double"

str(matrix_example)

 num [1:3, 1:6] 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...

dim(matrix_example)

[1] 3 6

nrow(matrix_example)

[1] 3

ncol(matrix_example)

[1] 6


## Challenge 4

What do you think will be the result of length(matrix_example)? Try it. Were you right? Why / why not?

## Solution to Challenge 4

What do you think will be the result of length(matrix_example)?

matrix_example <- matrix(0, ncol=6, nrow=3)
length(matrix_example)

[1] 18


Because a matrix is a vector with added dimension attributes, length gives you the total number of elements in the matrix.

## Challenge 5

Make another matrix, this time containing the numbers 1:50, with 5 columns and 10 rows. Did the matrix function fill your matrix by column, or by row, as its default behaviour? See if you can figure out how to change this. (hint: read the documentation for matrix!)

## Solution to Challenge 5

Make another matrix, this time containing the numbers 1:50, with 5 columns and 10 rows. Did the matrix function fill your matrix by column, or by row, as its default behaviour? See if you can figure out how to change this. (hint: read the documentation for matrix!)

x <- matrix(1:50, ncol=5, nrow=10)
x <- matrix(1:50, ncol=5, nrow=10, byrow = TRUE) # to fill by row


## Challenge 6

Create a list of length two containing a character vector for each of the sections in this part of the workshop:

• Data types
• Data structures

Populate each character vector with the names of the data types and data structures we’ve seen so far.

## Solution to Challenge 6

dataTypes <- c('double', 'complex', 'integer', 'character', 'logical')
dataStructures <- c('data.frame', 'vector', 'factor', 'list', 'matrix')


Note: it’s nice to make a list in big writing on the board or taped to the wall listing all of these types and structures - leave it up for the rest of the workshop to remind people of the importance of these basics.

## Challenge 7

Consider the R output of the matrix below:

     [,1] [,2]
[1,]    4    1
[2,]    9    5
[3,]   10    7


What was the correct command used to write this matrix? Examine each command and try to figure out the correct one before typing them. Think about what matrices the other commands will produce.

1. matrix(c(4, 1, 9, 5, 10, 7), nrow = 3)
2. matrix(c(4, 9, 10, 1, 5, 7), ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE)
3. matrix(c(4, 9, 10, 1, 5, 7), nrow = 2)
4. matrix(c(4, 1, 9, 5, 10, 7), ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE)

## Solution to Challenge 7

Consider the R output of the matrix below:

     [,1] [,2]
[1,]    4    1
[2,]    9    5
[3,]   10    7


What was the correct command used to write this matrix? Examine each command and try to figure out the correct one before typing them. Think about what matrices the other commands will produce.

matrix(c(4, 1, 9, 5, 10, 7), ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE)


## Key Points

• Use read.csv to read tabular data in R.

• The basic data types in R are double, integer, complex, logical, and character.

• Use factors to represent categories in R.

# Exploring Data Frames

## Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 10 min
Questions
• How can I manipulate a data frame?

Objectives
• Add and remove rows or columns.

• Remove rows with NA values.

• Append two data frames.

• Understand what a factor is.

• Convert a factor to a character vector and vice versa.

• Display basic properties of data frames including size and class of the columns, names, and first few rows.

At this point, you’ve seen it all: in the last lesson, we toured all the basic data types and data structures in R. Everything you do will be a manipulation of those tools. But most of the time, the star of the show is the data frame—the table that we created by loading information from a csv file. In this lesson, we’ll learn a few more things about working with data frames.

## Adding columns and rows in data frames

We already learned that the columns of a data frame are vectors, so that our data are consistent in type throughout the columns. As such, if we want to add a new column, we can start by making a new vector:

age <- c(2, 3, 5)
cats

    coat weight likes_string
1 calico    2.1            1
2  black    5.0            0
3  tabby    3.2            1


We can then add this as a column via:

cbind(cats, age)

    coat weight likes_string age
1 calico    2.1            1   2
2  black    5.0            0   3
3  tabby    3.2            1   5


Note that if we tried to add a vector of ages with a different number of entries than the number of rows in the data frame, it would fail:

age <- c(2, 3, 5, 12)
cbind(cats, age)

Error in data.frame(..., check.names = FALSE): arguments imply differing number of rows: 3, 4

age <- c(2, 3)
cbind(cats, age)

Error in data.frame(..., check.names = FALSE): arguments imply differing number of rows: 3, 2


Why didn’t this work? Of course, R wants to see one element in our new column for every row in the table:

nrow(cats)

[1] 3

length(age)

[1] 2


So for it to work we need to have nrow(cats) = length(age). Let’s overwrite the content of cats with our new data frame.

age <- c(2, 3, 5)
cats <- cbind(cats, age)


Now how about adding rows? We already know that the rows of a data frame are lists:

newRow <- list("tortoiseshell", 3.3, TRUE, 9)
cats <- rbind(cats, newRow)

Warning in [<-.factor(*tmp*, ri, value = "tortoiseshell"): invalid factor
level, NA generated


Looks like our attempt to use the rbind() function returns a warning. Recall that, unlike errors, warnings do not necessarily stop a function from performing its intended action. You can confirm this by taking a look at the cats data frame.

cats

    coat weight likes_string age
1 calico    2.1            1   2
2  black    5.0            0   3
3  tabby    3.2            1   5
4   <NA>    3.3            1   9


Notice that not only did we successfully add a new row, but there is NA in the column coats where we expected “tortoiseshell” to be. Why did this happen?

## Factors

For an object containing the data type factor, each different value represents what is called a level. In our case, the factor “coat” has 3 levels: “black”, “calico”, and “tabby”. R will only accept values that match one of the levels. If you add a new value, it will become NA.

The warning is telling us that we unsuccessfully added “tortoiseshell” to our coat factor, but 3.3 (a numeric), TRUE (a logical), and 9 (a numeric) were successfully added to weight, likes_string, and age, respectively, since those variables are not factors. To successfully add a cat with a “tortoiseshell” coat, add “tortoiseshell” as a possible level of the factor:

levels(cats$coat)  [1] "black" "calico" "tabby"  levels(cats$coat) <- c(levels(cats$coat), "tortoiseshell") cats <- rbind(cats, list("tortoiseshell", 3.3, TRUE, 9))  Alternatively, we can change a factor into a character vector; we lose the handy categories of the factor, but we can subsequently add any word we want to the column without babysitting the factor levels: str(cats)  'data.frame': 5 obs. of 4 variables:$ coat        : Factor w/ 4 levels "black","calico",..: 2 1 3 NA 4
$weight : num 2.1 5 3.2 3.3 3.3$ likes_string: int  1 0 1 1 1
$age : num 2 3 5 9 9  cats$coat <- as.character(cats$coat) str(cats)  'data.frame': 5 obs. of 4 variables:$ coat        : chr  "calico" "black" "tabby" NA ...
$weight : num 2.1 5 3.2 3.3 3.3$ likes_string: int  1 0 1 1 1
$age : num 2 3 5 9 9  ## Challenge 1 Let’s imagine that 1 cat year is equivalent to 7 human years. 1. Create a vector called human_age by multiplying cats$age by 7.
2. Convert human_age to a factor.
3. Convert human_age back to a numeric vector using the as.numeric() function. Now divide it by 7 to get the original ages back. Explain what happened.

1. human_age <- cats$age * 7 2. human_age <- factor(human_age). as.factor(human_age) works just as well. 3. as.numeric(human_age) yields 1 2 3 4 4 because factors are stored as integers (here, 1:4), each of which is associated with a label (here, 28, 35, 56, and 63). Converting the factor to a numeric vector gives us the underlying integers, not the labels. If we want the original numbers, we need to convert human_age to a character vector (using as.character(human_age)) and then to a numeric vector (why does this work?). This comes up in real life when we accidentally include a character somewhere in a column of a .csv file supposed to only contain numbers, and forget to set stringsAsFactors=FALSE when we read in the data. ## Removing rows We now know how to add rows and columns to our data frame in R—but in our first attempt to add a “tortoiseshell” cat to the data frame we have accidentally added a garbage row: cats   coat weight likes_string age 1 calico 2.1 1 2 2 black 5.0 0 3 3 tabby 3.2 1 5 4 <NA> 3.3 1 9 5 tortoiseshell 3.3 1 9  We can ask for a data frame minus this offending row: cats[-4, ]   coat weight likes_string age 1 calico 2.1 1 2 2 black 5.0 0 3 3 tabby 3.2 1 5 5 tortoiseshell 3.3 1 9  Notice the comma with nothing after it to indicate that we want to drop the entire fourth row. Note: we could also remove both new rows at once by putting the row numbers inside of a vector: cats[c(-4,-5), ] Alternatively, we can drop all rows with NA values: na.omit(cats)   coat weight likes_string age 1 calico 2.1 1 2 2 black 5.0 0 3 3 tabby 3.2 1 5 5 tortoiseshell 3.3 1 9  Let’s reassign the output to cats, so that our changes will be permanent: cats <- na.omit(cats)  ## Removing columns We can also remove columns in our data frame. What if we want to remove the column “age”. We can remove it in two ways, by variable number or by index. cats[,-4]   coat weight likes_string 1 calico 2.1 1 2 black 5.0 0 3 tabby 3.2 1 5 tortoiseshell 3.3 1  Notice the comma with nothing before it, indicating we want to keep all of the rows. Alternatively, we can drop the column by using the index name and the %in% operator. The %in% operator goes through each element of its left argument, in this case the names of cats, and asks, “Does this element occur in the second argument?” drop <- names(cats) %in% c("age") cats[,!drop]   coat weight likes_string 1 calico 2.1 1 2 black 5.0 0 3 tabby 3.2 1 5 tortoiseshell 3.3 1  We will cover subsetting with logical operators like %in% in more detail in the next episode. See the section Subsetting through other logical operations ## Appending to a data frame The key to remember when adding data to a data frame is that columns are vectors and rows are lists. We can also glue two data frames together with rbind: cats <- rbind(cats, cats) cats   coat weight likes_string age 1 calico 2.1 1 2 2 black 5.0 0 3 3 tabby 3.2 1 5 5 tortoiseshell 3.3 1 9 11 calico 2.1 1 2 21 black 5.0 0 3 31 tabby 3.2 1 5 51 tortoiseshell 3.3 1 9  But now the row names are unnecessarily complicated. We can remove the rownames, and R will automatically re-name them sequentially: rownames(cats) <- NULL cats   coat weight likes_string age 1 calico 2.1 1 2 2 black 5.0 0 3 3 tabby 3.2 1 5 4 tortoiseshell 3.3 1 9 5 calico 2.1 1 2 6 black 5.0 0 3 7 tabby 3.2 1 5 8 tortoiseshell 3.3 1 9  ## Challenge 2 You can create a new data frame right from within R with the following syntax: df <- data.frame(id = c("a", "b", "c"), x = 1:3, y = c(TRUE, TRUE, FALSE), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)  Make a data frame that holds the following information for yourself: • first name • last name • lucky number Then use rbind to add an entry for the people sitting beside you. Finally, use cbind to add a column with each person’s answer to the question, “Is it time for coffee break?” ## Solution to Challenge 2 df <- data.frame(first = c("Grace"), last = c("Hopper"), lucky_number = c(0), stringsAsFactors = FALSE) df <- rbind(df, list("Marie", "Curie", 238) ) df <- cbind(df, coffeetime = c(TRUE,TRUE))  ## Realistic example So far, you have seen the basics of manipulating data frames with our cat data; now let’s use those skills to digest a more realistic dataset. Let’s read in the gapminder dataset that we downloaded previously: gapminder <- read.csv("data/gapminder_data.csv", stringsAsFactors = TRUE)  ## Miscellaneous Tips • Another type of file you might encounter are tab-separated value files (.tsv). To specify a tab as a separator, use "\\t" or read.delim(). • Files can also be downloaded directly from the Internet into a local folder of your choice onto your computer using the download.file function. The read.csv function can then be executed to read the downloaded file from the download location, for example, download.file("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swcarpentry/r-novice-gapminder/gh-pages/_episodes_rmd/data/gapminder_data.csv", destfile = "data/gapminder_data.csv") gapminder <- read.csv("data/gapminder_data.csv", stringsAsFactors = TRUE)  • Alternatively, you can also read in files directly into R from the Internet by replacing the file paths with a web address in read.csv. One should note that in doing this no local copy of the csv file is first saved onto your computer. For example, gapminder <- read.csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swcarpentry/r-novice-gapminder/gh-pages/_episodes_rmd/data/gapminder_data.csv", stringsAsFactors = TRUE)  • You can read directly from excel spreadsheets without converting them to plain text first by using the readxl package. Let’s investigate gapminder a bit; the first thing we should always do is check out what the data looks like with str: str(gapminder)  'data.frame': 1704 obs. of 6 variables:$ country  : Factor w/ 142 levels "Afghanistan",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
$year : int 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 ...$ pop      : num  8425333 9240934 10267083 11537966 13079460 ...
$continent: Factor w/ 5 levels "Africa","Americas",..: 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 ...$ lifeExp  : num  28.8 30.3 32 34 36.1 ...
$gdpPercap: num 779 821 853 836 740 ...  An additional method for examining the structure of gapminder is to use the summary function. This function can be used on various objects in R. For data frames, summary yields a numeric, tabular, or descriptive summary of each column. Factor columns are summarized by the number of items in each level, numeric or integer columns by the descriptive statistics (quartiles and mean), and character columns by its length, class, and mode. summary(gapminder$country)

             Afghanistan                  Albania                  Algeria
12                       12                       12
Angola                Argentina                Australia
12                       12                       12
12                       12                       12
Belgium                    Benin                  Bolivia
12                       12                       12
Bosnia and Herzegovina                 Botswana                   Brazil
12                       12                       12
Bulgaria             Burkina Faso                  Burundi
12                       12                       12
12                       12                       12
12                       12                       12
China                 Colombia                  Comoros
12                       12                       12
Congo Dem. Rep.               Congo Rep.               Costa Rica
12                       12                       12
Cote d'Ivoire                  Croatia                     Cuba
12                       12                       12
Czech Republic                  Denmark                 Djibouti
12                       12                       12
12                       12                       12
12                       12                       12
Ethiopia                  Finland                   France
12                       12                       12
Gabon                   Gambia                  Germany
12                       12                       12
Ghana                   Greece                Guatemala
12                       12                       12
Guinea            Guinea-Bissau                    Haiti
12                       12                       12
Honduras          Hong Kong China                  Hungary
12                       12                       12
Iceland                    India                Indonesia
12                       12                       12
Iran                     Iraq                  Ireland
12                       12                       12
Israel                    Italy                  Jamaica
12                       12                       12
Japan                   Jordan                    Kenya
12                       12                       12
Korea Dem. Rep.               Korea Rep.                   Kuwait
12                       12                       12
Lebanon                  Lesotho                  Liberia
12                       12                       12
12                       12                       12
Malaysia                     Mali               Mauritania
12                       12                       12
Mauritius                   Mexico                 Mongolia
12                       12                       12
Montenegro                  Morocco               Mozambique
12                       12                       12
Myanmar                  Namibia                    Nepal
12                       12                       12
Netherlands              New Zealand                Nicaragua
12                       12                       12
Niger                  Nigeria                   Norway
12                       12                       12
Oman                 Pakistan                   Panama
12                       12                       12
(Other)
516


Along with the str and summary functions, we can examine individual columns of the data frame with our typeof function:

typeof(gapminder$year)  [1] "integer"  typeof(gapminder$country)

[1] "integer"

str(gapminder$country)   Factor w/ 142 levels "Afghanistan",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...  We can also interrogate the data frame for information about its dimensions; remembering that str(gapminder) said there were 1704 observations of 6 variables in gapminder, what do you think the following will produce, and why? length(gapminder)  [1] 6  A fair guess would have been to say that the length of a data frame would be the number of rows it has (1704), but this is not the case; remember, a data frame is a list of vectors and factors: typeof(gapminder)  [1] "list"  When length gave us 6, it’s because gapminder is built out of a list of 6 columns. To get the number of rows and columns in our dataset, try: nrow(gapminder)  [1] 1704  ncol(gapminder)  [1] 6  Or, both at once: dim(gapminder)  [1] 1704 6  We’ll also likely want to know what the titles of all the columns are, so we can ask for them later: colnames(gapminder)  [1] "country" "year" "pop" "continent" "lifeExp" "gdpPercap"  At this stage, it’s important to ask ourselves if the structure R is reporting matches our intuition or expectations; do the basic data types reported for each column make sense? If not, we need to sort any problems out now before they turn into bad surprises down the road, using what we’ve learned about how R interprets data, and the importance of strict consistency in how we record our data. Once we’re happy that the data types and structures seem reasonable, it’s time to start digging into our data proper. Check out the first few lines: head(gapminder)   country year pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap 1 Afghanistan 1952 8425333 Asia 28.801 779.4453 2 Afghanistan 1957 9240934 Asia 30.332 820.8530 3 Afghanistan 1962 10267083 Asia 31.997 853.1007 4 Afghanistan 1967 11537966 Asia 34.020 836.1971 5 Afghanistan 1972 13079460 Asia 36.088 739.9811 6 Afghanistan 1977 14880372 Asia 38.438 786.1134  ## Challenge 3 It’s good practice to also check the last few lines of your data and some in the middle. How would you do this? Searching for ones specifically in the middle isn’t too hard, but we could ask for a few lines at random. How would you code this? ## Solution to Challenge 3 To check the last few lines it’s relatively simple as R already has a function for this: tail(gapminder) tail(gapminder, n = 15)  What about a few arbitrary rows just in case something is odd in the middle? ## Tip: There are several ways to achieve this. The solution here presents one form of using nested functions, i.e. a function passed as an argument to another function. This might sound like a new concept, but you are already using it! Remember my_dataframe[rows, cols] will print to screen your data frame with the number of rows and columns you asked for (although you might have asked for a range or named columns for example). How would you get the last row if you don’t know how many rows your data frame has? R has a function for this. What about getting a (pseudorandom) sample? R also has a function for this. gapminder[sample(nrow(gapminder), 5), ]  To make sure our analysis is reproducible, we should put the code into a script file so we can come back to it later. ## Challenge 4 Go to file -> new file -> R script, and write an R script to load in the gapminder dataset. Put it in the scripts/ directory and add it to version control. Run the script using the source function, using the file path as its argument (or by pressing the “source” button in RStudio). ## Solution to Challenge 4 The source function can be used to use a script within a script. Assume you would like to load the same type of file over and over again and therefore you need to specify the arguments to fit the needs of your file. Instead of writing the necessary argument again and again you could just write it once and save it as a script. Then, you can use source("Your_Script_containing_the_load_function") in a new script to use the function of that script without writing everything again. Check out ?source to find out more. download.file("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swcarpentry/r-novice-gapminder/gh-pages/_episodes_rmd/data/gapminder_data.csv", destfile = "data/gapminder_data.csv") gapminder <- read.csv(file = "data/gapminder_data.csv", stringsAsFactors = TRUE)  To run the script and load the data into the gapminder variable: source(file = "scripts/load-gapminder.R")  ## Challenge 5 Read the output of str(gapminder) again; this time, use what you’ve learned about factors, lists and vectors, as well as the output of functions like colnames and dim to explain what everything that str prints out for gapminder means. If there are any parts you can’t interpret, discuss with your neighbors! ## Solution to Challenge 5 The object gapminder is a data frame with columns • country and continent are factors. • year is an integer vector. • pop, lifeExp, and gdpPercap are numeric vectors. ## Key Points • Use cbind() to add a new column to a data frame. • Use rbind() to add a new row to a data frame. • Remove rows from a data frame. • Use na.omit() to remove rows from a data frame with NA values. • Use levels() and as.character() to explore and manipulate factors. • Use str(), summary(), nrow(), ncol(), dim(), colnames(), rownames(), head(), and typeof() to understand the structure of a data frame. • Read in a csv file using read.csv(). • Understand what length() of a data frame represents. # Subsetting Data ## Overview Teaching: 35 min Exercises: 15 min Questions • How can I work with subsets of data in R? Objectives • To be able to subset vectors, factors, matrices, lists, and data frames • To be able to extract individual and multiple elements: by index, by name, using comparison operations • To be able to skip and remove elements from various data structures. R has many powerful subset operators. Mastering them will allow you to easily perform complex operations on any kind of dataset. There are six different ways we can subset any kind of object, and three different subsetting operators for the different data structures. Let’s start with the workhorse of R: a simple numeric vector. x <- c(5.4, 6.2, 7.1, 4.8, 7.5) names(x) <- c('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e') x   a b c d e 5.4 6.2 7.1 4.8 7.5  ## Atomic vectors In R, simple vectors containing character strings, numbers, or logical values are called atomic vectors because they can’t be further simplified. So now that we’ve created a dummy vector to play with, how do we get at its contents? ## Accessing elements using their indices To extract elements of a vector we can give their corresponding index, starting from one: x[1]   a 5.4  x[4]   d 4.8  It may look different, but the square brackets operator is a function. For vectors (and matrices), it means “get me the nth element”. We can ask for multiple elements at once: x[c(1, 3)]   a c 5.4 7.1  Or slices of the vector: x[1:4]   a b c d 5.4 6.2 7.1 4.8  the : operator creates a sequence of numbers from the left element to the right. 1:4  [1] 1 2 3 4  c(1, 2, 3, 4)  [1] 1 2 3 4  We can ask for the same element multiple times: x[c(1,1,3)]   a a c 5.4 5.4 7.1  If we ask for an index beyond the length of the vector, R will return a missing value: x[6]  <NA> NA  This is a vector of length one containing an NA, whose name is also NA. If we ask for the 0th element, we get an empty vector: x[0]  named numeric(0)  ## Vector numbering in R starts at 1 In many programming languages (C and Python, for example), the first element of a vector has an index of 0. In R, the first element is 1. ## Skipping and removing elements If we use a negative number as the index of a vector, R will return every element except for the one specified: x[-2]   a c d e 5.4 7.1 4.8 7.5  We can skip multiple elements: x[c(-1, -5)] # or x[-c(1,5)]   b c d 6.2 7.1 4.8  ## Tip: Order of operations A common trip up for novices occurs when trying to skip slices of a vector. It’s natural to try to negate a sequence like so: x[-1:3]  This gives a somewhat cryptic error: Error in x[-1:3]: only 0's may be mixed with negative subscripts  But remember the order of operations. : is really a function. It takes its first argument as -1, and its second as 3, so generates the sequence of numbers: c(-1, 0, 1, 2, 3). The correct solution is to wrap that function call in brackets, so that the - operator applies to the result: x[-(1:3)]   d e 4.8 7.5  To remove elements from a vector, we need to assign the result back into the variable: x <- x[-4] x   a b c e 5.4 6.2 7.1 7.5  ## Challenge 1 Given the following code: x <- c(5.4, 6.2, 7.1, 4.8, 7.5) names(x) <- c('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e') print(x)   a b c d e 5.4 6.2 7.1 4.8 7.5  Come up with at least 2 different commands that will produce the following output:  b c d 6.2 7.1 4.8  After you find 2 different commands, compare notes with your neighbour. Did you have different strategies? ## Solution to challenge 1 x[2:4]   b c d 6.2 7.1 4.8  x[-c(1,5)]   b c d 6.2 7.1 4.8  x[c(2,3,4)]   b c d 6.2 7.1 4.8  ## Subsetting by name We can extract elements by using their name, instead of extracting by index: x <- c(a=5.4, b=6.2, c=7.1, d=4.8, e=7.5) # we can name a vector 'on the fly' x[c("a", "c")]   a c 5.4 7.1  This is usually a much more reliable way to subset objects: the position of various elements can often change when chaining together subsetting operations, but the names will always remain the same! ## Subsetting through other logical operations We can also use any logical vector to subset: x[c(FALSE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE)]   c e 7.1 7.5  Since comparison operators (e.g. >, <, ==) evaluate to logical vectors, we can also use them to succinctly subset vectors: the following statement gives the same result as the previous one. x[x > 7]   c e 7.1 7.5  Breaking it down, this statement first evaluates x>7, generating a logical vector c(FALSE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE), and then selects the elements of x corresponding to the TRUE values. We can use == to mimic the previous method of indexing by name (remember you have to use == rather than = for comparisons): x[names(x) == "a"]   a 5.4  ## Tip: Combining logical conditions We often want to combine multiple logical criteria. For example, we might want to find all the countries that are located in Asia or Europe and have life expectancies within a certain range. Several operations for combining logical vectors exist in R: • &, the “logical AND” operator: returns TRUE if both the left and right are TRUE. • |, the “logical OR” operator: returns TRUE, if either the left or right (or both) are TRUE. You may sometimes see && and || instead of & and |. These two-character operators only look at the first element of each vector and ignore the remaining elements. In general you should not use the two-character operators in data analysis; save them for programming, i.e. deciding whether to execute a statement. • !, the “logical NOT” operator: converts TRUE to FALSE and FALSE to TRUE. It can negate a single logical condition (eg !TRUE becomes FALSE), or a whole vector of conditions(eg !c(TRUE, FALSE) becomes c(FALSE, TRUE)). Additionally, you can compare the elements within a single vector using the all function (which returns TRUE if every element of the vector is TRUE) and the any function (which returns TRUE if one or more elements of the vector are TRUE). ## Challenge 2 Given the following code: x <- c(5.4, 6.2, 7.1, 4.8, 7.5) names(x) <- c('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e') print(x)   a b c d e 5.4 6.2 7.1 4.8 7.5  Write a subsetting command to return the values in x that are greater than 4 and less than 7. ## Solution to challenge 2 x_subset <- x[x<7 & x>4] print(x_subset)   a b d 5.4 6.2 4.8  ## Tip: Non-unique names You should be aware that it is possible for multiple elements in a vector to have the same name. (For a data frame, columns can have the same name — although R tries to avoid this — but row names must be unique.) Consider these examples: x <- 1:3 x  [1] 1 2 3  names(x) <- c('a', 'a', 'a') x  a a a 1 2 3  x['a'] # only returns first value  a 1  x[names(x) == 'a'] # returns all three values  a a a 1 2 3  ## Tip: Getting help for operators Remember you can search for help on operators by wrapping them in quotes: help("%in%") or ?"%in%". ## Skipping named elements Skipping or removing named elements is a little harder. If we try to skip one named element by negating the string, R complains (slightly obscurely) that it doesn’t know how to take the negative of a string: x <- c(a=5.4, b=6.2, c=7.1, d=4.8, e=7.5) # we start again by naming a vector 'on the fly' x[-"a"]  Error in -"a": invalid argument to unary operator  However, we can use the != (not-equals) operator to construct a logical vector that will do what we want: x[names(x) != "a"]   b c d e 6.2 7.1 4.8 7.5  Skipping multiple named indices is a little bit harder still. Suppose we want to drop the "a" and "c" elements, so we try this: x[names(x)!=c("a","c")]  Warning in names(x) != c("a", "c"): longer object length is not a multiple of shorter object length   b c d e 6.2 7.1 4.8 7.5  R did something, but it gave us a warning that we ought to pay attention to - and it apparently gave us the wrong answer (the "c" element is still included in the vector)! So what does != actually do in this case? That’s an excellent question. ### Recycling Let’s take a look at the comparison component of this code: names(x) != c("a", "c")  Warning in names(x) != c("a", "c"): longer object length is not a multiple of shorter object length  [1] FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE  Why does R give TRUE as the third element of this vector, when names(x)[3] != "c" is obviously false? When you use !=, R tries to compare each element of the left argument with the corresponding element of its right argument. What happens when you compare vectors of different lengths? When one vector is shorter than the other, it gets recycled: In this case R repeats c("a", "c") as many times as necessary to match names(x), i.e. we get c("a","c","a","c","a"). Since the recycled "a" doesn’t match the third element of names(x), the value of != is TRUE. Because in this case the longer vector length (5) isn’t a multiple of the shorter vector length (2), R printed a warning message. If we had been unlucky and names(x) had contained six elements, R would silently have done the wrong thing (i.e., not what we intended it to do). This recycling rule can can introduce hard-to-find and subtle bugs! The way to get R to do what we really want (match each element of the left argument with all of the elements of the right argument) it to use the %in% operator. The %in% operator goes through each element of its left argument, in this case the names of x, and asks, “Does this element occur in the second argument?”. Here, since we want to exclude values, we also need a ! operator to change “in” to “not in”: x[! names(x) %in% c("a","c") ]   b d e 6.2 4.8 7.5  ## Challenge 3 Selecting elements of a vector that match any of a list of components is a very common data analysis task. For example, the gapminder data set contains country and continent variables, but no information between these two scales. Suppose we want to pull out information from southeast Asia: how do we set up an operation to produce a logical vector that is TRUE for all of the countries in southeast Asia and FALSE otherwise? Suppose you have these data: seAsia <- c("Myanmar","Thailand","Cambodia","Vietnam","Laos") ## read in the gapminder data that we downloaded in episode 2 gapminder <- read.csv("data/gapminder_data.csv", header=TRUE) ## extract the country column from a data frame (we'll see this later); ## convert from a factor to a character; ## and get just the non-repeated elements countries <- unique(as.character(gapminder$country))


There’s a wrong way (using only ==), which will give you a warning; a clunky way (using the logical operators == and |); and an elegant way (using %in%). See whether you can come up with all three and explain how they (don’t) work.

## Solution to challenge 3

• The wrong way to do this problem is countries==seAsia. This gives a warning ("In countries == seAsia : longer object length is not a multiple of shorter object length") and the wrong answer (a vector of all FALSE values), because none of the recycled values of seAsia happen to line up correctly with matching values in country.
• The clunky (but technically correct) way to do this problem is
 (countries=="Myanmar" | countries=="Thailand" |
countries=="Cambodia" | countries == "Vietnam" | countries=="Laos")


(or countries==seAsia[1] | countries==seAsia[2] | ...). This gives the correct values, but hopefully you can see how awkward it is (what if we wanted to select countries from a much longer list?).

• The best way to do this problem is countries %in% seAsia, which is both correct and easy to type (and read).

## Handling special values

At some point you will encounter functions in R that cannot handle missing, infinite, or undefined data.

There are a number of special functions you can use to filter out this data:

• is.na will return all positions in a vector, matrix, or data.frame containing NA (or NaN)
• likewise, is.nan, and is.infinite will do the same for NaN and Inf.
• is.finite will return all positions in a vector, matrix, or data.frame that do not contain NA, NaN or Inf.
• na.omit will filter out all missing values from a vector

## Factor subsetting

Now that we’ve explored the different ways to subset vectors, how do we subset the other data structures?

Factor subsetting works the same way as vector subsetting.

f <- factor(c("a", "a", "b", "c", "c", "d"))
f[f == "a"]

[1] a a
Levels: a b c d

f[f %in% c("b", "c")]

[1] b c c
Levels: a b c d

f[1:3]

[1] a a b
Levels: a b c d


Skipping elements will not remove the level even if no more of that category exists in the factor:

f[-3]

[1] a a c c d
Levels: a b c d


## Matrix subsetting

Matrices are also subsetted using the [ function. In this case it takes two arguments: the first applying to the rows, the second to its columns:

set.seed(1)
m <- matrix(rnorm(6*4), ncol=4, nrow=6)
m[3:4, c(3,1)]

            [,1]       [,2]
[1,]  1.12493092 -0.8356286
[2,] -0.04493361  1.5952808


You can leave the first or second arguments blank to retrieve all the rows or columns respectively:

m[, c(3,4)]

            [,1]        [,2]
[1,] -0.62124058  0.82122120
[2,] -2.21469989  0.59390132
[3,]  1.12493092  0.91897737
[4,] -0.04493361  0.78213630
[5,] -0.01619026  0.07456498
[6,]  0.94383621 -1.98935170


If we only access one row or column, R will automatically convert the result to a vector:

m[3,]

[1] -0.8356286  0.5757814  1.1249309  0.9189774


If you want to keep the output as a matrix, you need to specify a third argument; drop = FALSE:

m[3, , drop=FALSE]

           [,1]      [,2]     [,3]      [,4]
[1,] -0.8356286 0.5757814 1.124931 0.9189774


Unlike vectors, if we try to access a row or column outside of the matrix, R will throw an error:

m[, c(3,6)]

Error in m[, c(3, 6)]: subscript out of bounds


## Tip: Higher dimensional arrays

when dealing with multi-dimensional arrays, each argument to [ corresponds to a dimension. For example, a 3D array, the first three arguments correspond to the rows, columns, and depth dimension.

Because matrices are vectors, we can also subset using only one argument:

m[5]

[1] 0.3295078


This usually isn’t useful, and often confusing to read. However it is useful to note that matrices are laid out in column-major format by default. That is the elements of the vector are arranged column-wise:

matrix(1:6, nrow=2, ncol=3)

     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    3    5
[2,]    2    4    6


If you wish to populate the matrix by row, use byrow=TRUE:

matrix(1:6, nrow=2, ncol=3, byrow=TRUE)

     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    2    3
[2,]    4    5    6


Matrices can also be subsetted using their rownames and column names instead of their row and column indices.

## Challenge 4

Given the following code:

m <- matrix(1:18, nrow=3, ncol=6)
print(m)

     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
[1,]    1    4    7   10   13   16
[2,]    2    5    8   11   14   17
[3,]    3    6    9   12   15   18

1. Which of the following commands will extract the values 11 and 14?

A. m[2,4,2,5]

B. m[2:5]

C. m[4:5,2]

D. m[2,c(4,5)]

D

## List subsetting

Now we’ll introduce some new subsetting operators. There are three functions used to subset lists. We’ve already seen these when learning about atomic vectors and matrices: [, [[, and $. Using [ will always return a list. If you want to subset a list, but not extract an element, then you will likely use [. xlist <- list(a = "Software Carpentry", b = 1:10, data = head(mtcars)) xlist[1]  $a
[1] "Software Carpentry"


This returns a list with one element.

We can subset elements of a list exactly the same way as atomic vectors using [. Comparison operations however won’t work as they’re not recursive, they will try to condition on the data structures in each element of the list, not the individual elements within those data structures.

xlist[1:2]

$a [1] "Software Carpentry"$b
[1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10


To extract individual elements of a list, you need to use the double-square bracket function: [[.

xlist[[1]]

[1] "Software Carpentry"


Notice that now the result is a vector, not a list.

You can’t extract more than one element at once:

xlist[[1:2]]

Error in xlist[[1:2]]: subscript out of bounds


Nor use it to skip elements:

xlist[[-1]]

Error in xlist[[-1]]: invalid negative subscript in get1index <real>


But you can use names to both subset and extract elements:

xlist[["a"]]

[1] "Software Carpentry"


The $ function is a shorthand way for extracting elements by name: xlist$data

                   mpg cyl disp  hp drat    wt  qsec vs am gear carb
Mazda RX4         21.0   6  160 110 3.90 2.620 16.46  0  1    4    4
Mazda RX4 Wag     21.0   6  160 110 3.90 2.875 17.02  0  1    4    4
Datsun 710        22.8   4  108  93 3.85 2.320 18.61  1  1    4    1
Hornet 4 Drive    21.4   6  258 110 3.08 3.215 19.44  1  0    3    1
Hornet Sportabout 18.7   8  360 175 3.15 3.440 17.02  0  0    3    2
Valiant           18.1   6  225 105 2.76 3.460 20.22  1  0    3    1


## Challenge 5

Given the following list:

xlist <- list(a = "Software Carpentry", b = 1:10, data = head(mtcars))


Using your knowledge of both list and vector subsetting, extract the number 2 from xlist. Hint: the number 2 is contained within the “b” item in the list.

xlist$b[2]  [1] 2  xlist[[2]][2]  [1] 2  xlist[["b"]][2]  [1] 2  ## Challenge 6 Given a linear model: mod <- aov(pop ~ lifeExp, data=gapminder)  Extract the residual degrees of freedom (hint: attributes() will help you) ## Solution to challenge 6 attributes(mod) ## df.residual is one of the names of mod  mod$df.residual


## Data frames

Remember the data frames are lists underneath the hood, so similar rules apply. However they are also two dimensional objects:

[ with one argument will act the same way as for lists, where each list element corresponds to a column. The resulting object will be a data frame:

head(gapminder[3])

       pop
1  8425333
2  9240934
3 10267083
4 11537966
5 13079460
6 14880372


Similarly, [[ will act to extract a single column:

head(gapminder[["lifeExp"]])

[1] 28.801 30.332 31.997 34.020 36.088 38.438


And $ provides a convenient shorthand to extract columns by name: head(gapminder$year)

[1] 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977


With two arguments, [ behaves the same way as for matrices:

gapminder[1:3,]

      country year      pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap
1 Afghanistan 1952  8425333      Asia  28.801  779.4453
2 Afghanistan 1957  9240934      Asia  30.332  820.8530
3 Afghanistan 1962 10267083      Asia  31.997  853.1007


If we subset a single row, the result will be a data frame (because the elements are mixed types):

gapminder[3,]

      country year      pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap
3 Afghanistan 1962 10267083      Asia  31.997  853.1007


But for a single column the result will be a vector (this can be changed with the third argument, drop = FALSE).

## Challenge 7

Fix each of the following common data frame subsetting errors:

1. Extract observations collected for the year 1957

gapminder[gapminder$year = 1957,]  2. Extract all columns except 1 through to 4 gapminder[,-1:4]  3. Extract the rows where the life expectancy is longer the 80 years gapminder[gapminder$lifeExp > 80]

4. Extract the first row, and the fourth and fifth columns (continent and lifeExp).

gapminder[1, 4, 5]

5. Advanced: extract rows that contain information for the years 2002 and 2007

gapminder[gapminder$year == 2002 | 2007,]  ## Solution to challenge 7 Fix each of the following common data frame subsetting errors: 1. Extract observations collected for the year 1957 # gapminder[gapminder$year = 1957,]
gapminder[gapminder$year == 1957,]  2. Extract all columns except 1 through to 4 # gapminder[,-1:4] gapminder[,-c(1:4)]  3. Extract the rows where the life expectancy is longer than 80 years # gapminder[gapminder$lifeExp > 80]
gapminder[gapminder$lifeExp > 80,]  4. Extract the first row, and the fourth and fifth columns (continent and lifeExp). # gapminder[1, 4, 5] gapminder[1, c(4, 5)]  5. Advanced: extract rows that contain information for the years 2002 and 2007  # gapminder[gapminder$year == 2002 | 2007,]
gapminder[gapminder$year == 2002 | gapminder$year == 2007,]
gapminder[gapminder$year %in% c(2002, 2007),]  ## Challenge 8 1. Why does gapminder[1:20] return an error? How does it differ from gapminder[1:20, ]? 2. Create a new data.frame called gapminder_small that only contains rows 1 through 9 and 19 through 23. You can do this in one or two steps. ## Solution to challenge 8 1. gapminder is a data.frame so needs to be subsetted on two dimensions. gapminder[1:20, ] subsets the data to give the first 20 rows and all columns. gapminder_small <- gapminder[c(1:9, 19:23),]  ## Key Points • Indexing in R starts at 1, not 0. • Access individual values by location using []. • Access slices of data using [low:high]. • Access arbitrary sets of data using [c(...)]. • Use logical operations and logical vectors to access subsets of data. # Control Flow ## Overview Teaching: 45 min Exercises: 20 min Questions • How can I make data-dependent choices in R? • How can I repeat operations in R? Objectives • Write conditional statements with if() and else(). • Write and understand for() loops. Often when we’re coding we want to control the flow of our actions. This can be done by setting actions to occur only if a condition or a set of conditions are met. Alternatively, we can also set an action to occur a particular number of times. There are several ways you can control flow in R. For conditional statements, the most commonly used approaches are the constructs: # if if (condition is true) { perform action } # if ... else if (condition is true) { perform action } else { # that is, if the condition is false, perform alternative action }  Say, for example, that we want R to print a message if a variable x has a particular value: x <- 8 if (x >= 10) { print("x is greater than or equal to 10") } x  [1] 8  The print statement does not appear in the console because x is not greater than 10. To print a different message for numbers less than 10, we can add an else statement. x <- 8 if (x >= 10) { print("x is greater than or equal to 10") } else { print("x is less than 10") }  [1] "x is less than 10"  You can also test multiple conditions by using else if. x <- 8 if (x >= 10) { print("x is greater than or equal to 10") } else if (x > 5) { print("x is greater than 5, but less than 10") } else { print("x is less than 5") }  [1] "x is greater than 5, but less than 10"  Important: when R evaluates the condition inside if() statements, it is looking for a logical element, i.e., TRUE or FALSE. This can cause some headaches for beginners. For example: x <- 4 == 3 if (x) { "4 equals 3" } else { "4 does not equal 3" }  [1] "4 does not equal 3"  As we can see, the not equal message was printed because the vector x is FALSE x <- 4 == 3 x  [1] FALSE  ## Challenge 1 Use an if() statement to print a suitable message reporting whether there are any records from 2002 in the gapminder dataset. Now do the same for 2012. ## Solution to Challenge 1 We will first see a solution to Challenge 1 which does not use the any() function. We first obtain a logical vector describing which element of gapminder$year is equal to 2002:

gapminder[(gapminder$year == 2002),]  Then, we count the number of rows of the data.frame gapminder that correspond to the 2002: rows2002_number <- nrow(gapminder[(gapminder$year == 2002),])


The presence of any record for the year 2002 is equivalent to the request that rows2002_number is one or more:

rows2002_number >= 1


Putting all together, we obtain:

if(nrow(gapminder[(gapminder$year == 2002),]) >= 1){ print("Record(s) for the year 2002 found.") }  All this can be done more quickly with any(). The logical condition can be expressed as: if(any(gapminder$year == 2002)){
print("Record(s) for the year 2002 found.")
}


Did anyone get a warning message like this?

Warning in if (gapminder$year == 2012) {: the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used  The if() function only accepts singular (of length 1) inputs, and therefore returns an error when you use it with a vector. The if() function will still run, but will only evaluate the condition in the first element of the vector. Therefore, to use the if() function, you need to make sure your input is singular (of length 1). ## Tip: Built in ifelse() function R accepts both if() and else if() statements structured as outlined above, but also statements using R’s built-in ifelse() function. This function accepts both singular and vector inputs and is structured as follows: # ifelse function ifelse(condition is true, perform action, perform alternative action)  where the first argument is the condition or a set of conditions to be met, the second argument is the statement that is evaluated when the condition is TRUE, and the third statement is the statement that is evaluated when the condition is FALSE. y <- -3 ifelse(y < 0, "y is a negative number", "y is either positive or zero")  [1] "y is a negative number"  ## Tip: any() and all() The any() function will return TRUE if at least one TRUE value is found within a vector, otherwise it will return FALSE. This can be used in a similar way to the %in% operator. The function all(), as the name suggests, will only return TRUE if all values in the vector are TRUE. ## Repeating operations If you want to iterate over a set of values, when the order of iteration is important, and perform the same operation on each, a for() loop will do the job. We saw for() loops in the shell lessons earlier. This is the most flexible of looping operations, but therefore also the hardest to use correctly. In general, the advice of many R users would be to learn about for() loops, but to avoid using for() loops unless the order of iteration is important: i.e. the calculation at each iteration depends on the results of previous iterations. If the order of iteration is not important, then you should learn about vectorized alternatives, such as the purr package, as they pay off in computational efficiency. The basic structure of a for() loop is: for (iterator in set of values) { do a thing }  For example: for (i in 1:10) { print(i) }  [1] 1 [1] 2 [1] 3 [1] 4 [1] 5 [1] 6 [1] 7 [1] 8 [1] 9 [1] 10  The 1:10 bit creates a vector on the fly; you can iterate over any other vector as well. We can use a for() loop nested within another for() loop to iterate over two things at once. for (i in 1:5) { for (j in c('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e')) { print(paste(i,j)) } }  [1] "1 a" [1] "1 b" [1] "1 c" [1] "1 d" [1] "1 e" [1] "2 a" [1] "2 b" [1] "2 c" [1] "2 d" [1] "2 e" [1] "3 a" [1] "3 b" [1] "3 c" [1] "3 d" [1] "3 e" [1] "4 a" [1] "4 b" [1] "4 c" [1] "4 d" [1] "4 e" [1] "5 a" [1] "5 b" [1] "5 c" [1] "5 d" [1] "5 e"  We notice in the output that when the first index (i) is set to 1, the second index (j) iterates through its full set of indices. Once the indices of j have been iterated through, then i is incremented. This process continues until the last index has been used for each for() loop. Rather than printing the results, we could write the loop output to a new object. output_vector <- c() for (i in 1:5) { for (j in c('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e')) { temp_output <- paste(i, j) output_vector <- c(output_vector, temp_output) } } output_vector   [1] "1 a" "1 b" "1 c" "1 d" "1 e" "2 a" "2 b" "2 c" "2 d" "2 e" "3 a" "3 b" [13] "3 c" "3 d" "3 e" "4 a" "4 b" "4 c" "4 d" "4 e" "5 a" "5 b" "5 c" "5 d" [25] "5 e"  This approach can be useful, but ‘growing your results’ (building the result object incrementally) is computationally inefficient, so avoid it when you are iterating through a lot of values. ## Tip: don’t grow your results One of the biggest things that trips up novices and experienced R users alike, is building a results object (vector, list, matrix, data frame) as your for loop progresses. Computers are very bad at handling this, so your calculations can very quickly slow to a crawl. It’s much better to define an empty results object before hand of appropriate dimensions, rather than initializing an empty object without dimensions. So if you know the end result will be stored in a matrix like above, create an empty matrix with 5 row and 5 columns, then at each iteration store the results in the appropriate location. A better way is to define your (empty) output object before filling in the values. For this example, it looks more involved, but is still more efficient. output_matrix <- matrix(nrow=5, ncol=5) j_vector <- c('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e') for (i in 1:5) { for (j in 1:5) { temp_j_value <- j_vector[j] temp_output <- paste(i, temp_j_value) output_matrix[i, j] <- temp_output } } output_vector2 <- as.vector(output_matrix) output_vector2   [1] "1 a" "2 a" "3 a" "4 a" "5 a" "1 b" "2 b" "3 b" "4 b" "5 b" "1 c" "2 c" [13] "3 c" "4 c" "5 c" "1 d" "2 d" "3 d" "4 d" "5 d" "1 e" "2 e" "3 e" "4 e" [25] "5 e"  ## Tip: While loops Sometimes you will find yourself needing to repeat an operation as long as a certain condition is met. You can do this with a while() loop. while(this condition is true){ do a thing }  R will interpret a condition being met as “TRUE”. As an example, here’s a while loop that generates random numbers from a uniform distribution (the runif() function) between 0 and 1 until it gets one that’s less than 0.1. z <- 1 while(z > 0.1){ z <- runif(1) cat(z, "\n") }  while() loops will not always be appropriate. You have to be particularly careful that you don’t end up stuck in an infinite loop because your condition is always met and hence the while statement never terminates. ## Challenge 2 Compare the objects output_vector and output_vector2. Are they the same? If not, why not? How would you change the last block of code to make output_vector2 the same as output_vector? ## Solution to Challenge 2 We can check whether the two vectors are identical using the all() function: all(output_vector == output_vector2)  However, all the elements of output_vector can be found in output_vector2: all(output_vector %in% output_vector2)  and vice versa: all(output_vector2 %in% output_vector)  therefore, the element in output_vector and output_vector2 are just sorted in a different order. This is because as.vector() outputs the elements of an input matrix going over its column. Taking a look at output_matrix, we can notice that we want its elements by rows. The solution is to transpose the output_matrix. We can do it either by calling the transpose function t() or by inputting the elements in the right order. The first solution requires to change the original output_vector2 <- as.vector(output_matrix)  into output_vector2 <- as.vector(t(output_matrix))  The second solution requires to change output_matrix[i, j] <- temp_output  into output_matrix[j, i] <- temp_output  ## Challenge 3 Write a script that loops through the gapminder data by continent and prints out whether the mean life expectancy is smaller or larger than 50 years. ## Solution to Challenge 3 Step 1: We want to make sure we can extract all the unique values of the continent vector gapminder <- read.csv("data/gapminder_data.csv") unique(gapminder$continent)


Step 2: We also need to loop over each of these continents and calculate the average life expectancy for each subset of data. We can do that as follows:

1. Loop over each of the unique values of ‘continent’
2. For each value of continent, create a temporary variable storing that subset
3. Return the calculated life expectancy to the user by printing the output:
for (iContinent in unique(gapminder$continent)) { tmp <- gapminder[gapminder$continent == iContinent, ]
cat(iContinent, mean(tmp$lifeExp, na.rm = TRUE), "\n") rm(tmp) }  Step 3: The exercise only wants the output printed if the average life expectancy is less than 50 or greater than 50. So we need to add an if() condition before printing, which evaluates whether the calculated average life expectancy is above or below a threshold, and print an output conditional on the result. We need to amend (3) from above: 3a. If the calculated life expectancy is less than some threshold (50 years), return the continent and a statement that life expectancy is less than threshold, otherwise return the continent and a statement that life expectancy is greater than threshold,: thresholdValue <- 50 for (iContinent in unique(gapminder$continent)) {
tmp <- mean(gapminder[gapminder$country == iCountry, "lifeExp"]) if(tmp < lowerThreshold){ cat("Average Life Expectancy in", iCountry, "is less than", lowerThreshold, "\n") } else if(tmp > lowerThreshold && tmp < upperThreshold){ cat("Average Life Expectancy in", iCountry, "is between", lowerThreshold, "and", upperThreshold, "\n") } else{ cat("Average Life Expectancy in", iCountry, "is greater than", upperThreshold, "\n") } rm(tmp) }  ## Challenge 5 - Advanced Write a script that loops over each country in the gapminder dataset, tests whether the country starts with a ‘B’, and graphs life expectancy against time as a line graph if the mean life expectancy is under 50 years. ## Solution for Challenge 5 We will use the grep() command that was introduced in the Unix Shell lesson to find countries that start with “B.” Lets understand how to do this first. Following from the Unix shell section we may be tempted to try the following grep("^B", unique(gapminder$country))


But when we evaluate this command it returns the indices of the factor variable country that start with “B.” To get the values, we must add the value=TRUE option to the grep() command:

grep("^B", unique(gapminder$country), value=TRUE)  We will now store these countries in a variable called candidateCountries, and then loop over each entry in the variable. Inside the loop, we evaluate the average life expectancy for each country, and if the average life expectancy is less than 50 we use base-plot to plot the evolution of average life expectancy using with() and subset(): thresholdValue <- 50 candidateCountries <- grep("^B", unique(gapminder$country), value=TRUE)

for (iCountry in candidateCountries) {
tmp <- mean(gapminder[gapminder$country == iCountry, "lifeExp"]) if(tmp < thresholdValue){ cat("Average Life Expectancy in", iCountry, "is less than", thresholdValue, "plotting life expectancy graph... \n") with(subset(gapminder, country==iCountry), plot(year, lifeExp, type="o", main = paste("Life Expectancy in", iCountry, "over time"), ylab = "Life Expectancy", xlab = "Year" ) # end plot ) # end with } # end for loop rm(tmp) }  ## Key Points • Use if and else to make choices. • Use for to repeat operations. # Creating Publication-Quality Graphics with ggplot2 ## Overview Teaching: 60 min Exercises: 20 min Questions • How can I create publication-quality graphics in R? Objectives • To be able to use ggplot2 to generate publication quality graphics. • To apply geometry, aesthetic, and statistics layers to a ggplot plot. • To manipulate the aesthetics of a plot using different colors, shapes, and lines. • To improve data visualization through transforming scales and paneling by group. • To save a plot created with ggplot to disk. Plotting our data is one of the best ways to quickly explore it and the various relationships between variables. There are three main plotting systems in R, the base plotting system, the lattice package, and the ggplot2 package. Today we’ll be learning about the ggplot2 package, because it is the most effective for creating publication quality graphics. ggplot2 is built on the grammar of graphics, the idea that any plot can be expressed from the same set of components: a data set, a coordinate system, and a set of geoms – the visual representation of data points. The key to understanding ggplot2 is thinking about a figure in layers. This idea may be familiar to you if you have used image editing programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Inkscape. Let’s start off with an example: library("ggplot2") ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point()  So the first thing we do is call the ggplot function. This function lets R know that we’re creating a new plot, and any of the arguments we give the ggplot function are the global options for the plot: they apply to all layers on the plot. We’ve passed in two arguments to ggplot. First, we tell ggplot what data we want to show on our figure, in this example the gapminder data we read in earlier. For the second argument, we passed in the aes function, which tells ggplot how variables in the data map to aesthetic properties of the figure, in this case the x and y locations. Here we told ggplot we want to plot the “gdpPercap” column of the gapminder data frame on the x-axis, and the “lifeExp” column on the y-axis. Notice that we didn’t need to explicitly pass aes these columns (e.g. x = gapminder[, "gdpPercap"]), this is because ggplot is smart enough to know to look in the data for that column! By itself, the call to ggplot isn’t enough to draw a figure: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp))  We need to tell ggplot how we want to visually represent the data, which we do by adding a new geom layer. In our example, we used geom_point, which tells ggplot we want to visually represent the relationship between x and y as a scatterplot of points: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point()  ## Challenge 1 Modify the example so that the figure shows how life expectancy has changed over time: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point()  Hint: the gapminder dataset has a column called “year”, which should appear on the x-axis. ## Solution to challenge 1 Here is one possible solution: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = year, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point()  ## Challenge 2 In the previous examples and challenge we’ve used the aes function to tell the scatterplot geom about the x and y locations of each point. Another aesthetic property we can modify is the point color. Modify the code from the previous challenge to color the points by the “continent” column. What trends do you see in the data? Are they what you expected? ## Solution to challenge 2 The solution presented below adds color=continent to the call of the aes function. The general trend seems to indicate an increased life expectancy over the years. On continents with stronger economies we find a longer life expectancy. ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, color=continent)) + geom_point()  ## Layers Using a scatterplot probably isn’t the best for visualizing change over time. Instead, let’s tell ggplot to visualize the data as a line plot: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x=year, y=lifeExp, by=country, color=continent)) + geom_line()  Instead of adding a geom_point layer, we’ve added a geom_line layer. We’ve added the by aesthetic, which tells ggplot to draw a line for each country. But what if we want to visualize both lines and points on the plot? We can add another layer to the plot: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x=year, y=lifeExp, by=country, color=continent)) + geom_line() + geom_point()  It’s important to note that each layer is drawn on top of the previous layer. In this example, the points have been drawn on top of the lines. Here’s a demonstration: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x=year, y=lifeExp, by=country)) + geom_line(mapping = aes(color=continent)) + geom_point()  In this example, the aesthetic mapping of color has been moved from the global plot options in ggplot to the geom_line layer so it no longer applies to the points. Now we can clearly see that the points are drawn on top of the lines. ## Tip: Setting an aesthetic to a value instead of a mapping So far, we’ve seen how to use an aesthetic (such as color) as a mapping to a variable in the data. For example, when we use geom_line(mapping = aes(color=continent)), ggplot will give a different color to each continent. But what if we want to change the colour of all lines to blue? You may think that geom_line(mapping = aes(color="blue")) should work, but it doesn’t. Since we don’t want to create a mapping to a specific variable, we can move the color specification outside of the aes() function, like this: geom_line(color="blue"). ## Challenge 3 Switch the order of the point and line layers from the previous example. What happened? ## Solution to challenge 3 The lines now get drawn over the points! ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x=year, y=lifeExp, by=country)) + geom_point() + geom_line(mapping = aes(color=continent))  ## Transformations and statistics ggplot2 also makes it easy to overlay statistical models over the data. To demonstrate we’ll go back to our first example: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point()  Currently it’s hard to see the relationship between the points due to some strong outliers in GDP per capita. We can change the scale of units on the x axis using the scale functions. These control the mapping between the data values and visual values of an aesthetic. We can also modify the transparency of the points, using the alpha function, which is especially helpful when you have a large amount of data which is very clustered. ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point(alpha = 0.5) + scale_x_log10()  The log10 function applied a transformation to the values of the gdpPercap column before rendering them on the plot, so that each multiple of 10 now only corresponds to an increase in 1 on the transformed scale, e.g. a GDP per capita of 1,000 is now 3 on the x axis, a value of 10,000 corresponds to 4 on the x axis and so on. This makes it easier to visualize the spread of data on the x-axis. ## Tip Reminder: Setting an aesthetic to a value instead of a mapping Notice that we used geom_point(alpha = 0.5). As the previous tip mentioned, using a setting outside of the aes() function will cause this value to be used for all points, which is what we want in this case. But just like any other aesthetic setting, alpha can also be mapped to a variable in the data. For example, we can give a different transparency to each continent with geom_point(mapping = aes(alpha = continent)). We can fit a simple relationship to the data by adding another layer, geom_smooth: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point() + scale_x_log10() + geom_smooth(method="lm")  geom_smooth() using formula 'y ~ x'  We can make the line thicker by setting the size aesthetic in the geom_smooth layer: ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point() + scale_x_log10() + geom_smooth(method="lm", size=1.5)  geom_smooth() using formula 'y ~ x'  There are two ways an aesthetic can be specified. Here we set the size aesthetic by passing it as an argument to geom_smooth. Previously in the lesson we’ve used the aes function to define a mapping between data variables and their visual representation. ## Challenge 4a Modify the color and size of the points on the point layer in the previous example. Hint: do not use the aes function. ## Solution to challenge 4a Here a possible solution: Notice that the color argument is supplied outside of the aes() function. This means that it applies to all data points on the graph and is not related to a specific variable. ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point(size=3, color="orange") + scale_x_log10() + geom_smooth(method="lm", size=1.5)  geom_smooth() using formula 'y ~ x'  ## Challenge 4b Modify your solution to Challenge 4a so that the points are now a different shape and are colored by continent with new trendlines. Hint: The color argument can be used inside the aesthetic. ## Solution to challenge 4b Here is a possible solution: Notice that supplying the color argument inside the aes() functions enables you to connect it to a certain variable. The shape argument, as you can see, modifies all data points the same way (it is outside the aes() call) while the color argument which is placed inside the aes() call modifies a point’s color based on its continent value. ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp, color = continent)) + geom_point(size=3, shape=17) + scale_x_log10() + geom_smooth(method="lm", size=1.5)  geom_smooth() using formula 'y ~ x'  ## Multi-panel figures Earlier we visualized the change in life expectancy over time across all countries in one plot. Alternatively, we can split this out over multiple panels by adding a layer of facet panels. ## Tip We start by making a subset of data including only countries located in the Americas. This includes 25 countries, which will begin to clutter the figure. Note that we apply a “theme” definition to rotate the x-axis labels to maintain readability. Nearly everything in ggplot2 is customizable. americas <- gapminder[gapminder$continent == "Americas",]
ggplot(data = americas, mapping = aes(x = year, y = lifeExp)) +
geom_line() +
facet_wrap( ~ country) +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45))


The facet_wrap layer took a “formula” as its argument, denoted by the tilde (~). This tells R to draw a panel for each unique value in the country column of the gapminder dataset.

## Modifying text

To clean this figure up for a publication we need to change some of the text elements. The x-axis is too cluttered, and the y axis should read “Life expectancy”, rather than the column name in the data frame.

We can do this by adding a couple of different layers. The theme layer controls the axis text, and overall text size. Labels for the axes, plot title and any legend can be set using the labs function. Legend titles are set using the same names we used in the aes specification. Thus below the color legend title is set using color = "Continent", while the title of a fill legend would be set using fill = "MyTitle".

ggplot(data = americas, mapping = aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, color=continent)) +
geom_line() + facet_wrap( ~ country) +
labs(
x = "Year",              # x axis title
y = "Life expectancy",   # y axis title
title = "Figure 1",      # main title of figure
color = "Continent"      # title of legend
) +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1))


## Exporting the plot

The ggsave() function allows you to export a plot created with ggplot. You can specify the dimension and resolution of your plot by adjusting the appropriate arguments (width, height and dpi) to create high quality graphics for publication. In order to save the plot from above, we first assign it to a variable lifeExp_plot, then tell ggsave to save that plot in png format to a directory called results. (Make sure you have a results/ folder in your working directory.)

lifeExp_plot <- ggplot(data = americas, mapping = aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, color=continent)) +
geom_line() + facet_wrap( ~ country) +
labs(
x = "Year",              # x axis title
y = "Life expectancy",   # y axis title
title = "Figure 1",      # main title of figure
color = "Continent"      # title of legend
) +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1))

ggsave(filename = "results/lifeExp.png", plot = lifeExp_plot, width = 12, height = 10, dpi = 300, units = "cm")


There are two nice things about ggsave. First, it defaults to the last plot, so if you omit the plot argument it will automatically save the last plot you created with ggplot. Secondly, it tries to determine the format you want to save your plot in from the file extension you provide for the filename (for example .png or .pdf). If you need to, you can specify the format explicitly in the device argument.

This is a taste of what you can do with ggplot2. RStudio provides a really useful cheat sheet of the different layers available, and more extensive documentation is available on the ggplot2 website. Finally, if you have no idea how to change something, a quick Google search will usually send you to a relevant question and answer on Stack Overflow with reusable code to modify!

## Challenge 5

Generate boxplots to compare life expectancy between the different continents during the available years.

• Rename y axis as Life Expectancy.
• Remove x axis labels.

## Solution to Challenge 5

Here a possible solution: xlab() and ylab() set labels for the x and y axes, respectively The axis title, text and ticks are attributes of the theme and must be modified within a theme() call.

ggplot(data = gapminder, mapping = aes(x = continent, y = lifeExp, fill = continent)) +
geom_boxplot() + facet_wrap(~year) +
ylab("Life Expectancy") +
theme(axis.title.x=element_blank(),
axis.text.x = element_blank(),
axis.ticks.x = element_blank())


## Key Points

• Use ggplot2 to create plots.

• Think about graphics in layers: aesthetics, geometry, statistics, scale transformation, and grouping.

# Vectorization

## Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 15 min
Questions
• How can I operate on all the elements of a vector at once?

Objectives
• To understand vectorized operations in R.

Most of R’s functions are vectorized, meaning that the function will operate on all elements of a vector without needing to loop through and act on each element one at a time. This makes writing code more concise, easy to read, and less error prone.

x <- 1:4
x * 2

[1] 2 4 6 8


The multiplication happened to each element of the vector.

We can also add two vectors together:

y <- 6:9
x + y

[1]  7  9 11 13


Each element of x was added to its corresponding element of y:

x:  1  2  3  4
+  +  +  +
y:  6  7  8  9
---------------
7  9 11 13


Here is how we would add two vectors together using a for loop:

output_vector <- c()
for (i in 1:4) {
output_vector[i] <- x[i] + y[i]
}
output_vector

[1]  7  9 11 13


Compare this to the output using vectorised operations.

sum_xy <- x + y
sum_xy

[1]  7  9 11 13


## Challenge 1

Let’s try this on the pop column of the gapminder dataset.

Make a new column in the gapminder data frame that contains population in units of millions of people. Check the head or tail of the data frame to make sure it worked.

## Solution to challenge 1

Let’s try this on the pop column of the gapminder dataset.

Make a new column in the gapminder data frame that contains population in units of millions of people. Check the head or tail of the data frame to make sure it worked.

gapminder$pop_millions <- gapminder$pop / 1e6

      country year      pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap pop_millions
1 Afghanistan 1952  8425333      Asia  28.801  779.4453     8.425333
2 Afghanistan 1957  9240934      Asia  30.332  820.8530     9.240934
3 Afghanistan 1962 10267083      Asia  31.997  853.1007    10.267083
4 Afghanistan 1967 11537966      Asia  34.020  836.1971    11.537966
5 Afghanistan 1972 13079460      Asia  36.088  739.9811    13.079460
6 Afghanistan 1977 14880372      Asia  38.438  786.1134    14.880372


## Challenge 2

On a single graph, plot population, in millions, against year, for all countries. Don’t worry about identifying which country is which.

Repeat the exercise, graphing only for China, India, and Indonesia. Again, don’t worry about which is which.

## Solution to challenge 2

Refresh your plotting skills by plotting population in millions against year.

ggplot(gapminder, aes(x = year, y = pop_millions)) +
geom_point()


countryset <- c("China","India","Indonesia")
ggplot(gapminder[gapminder$country %in% countryset,], aes(x = year, y = pop_millions)) + geom_point()  Comparison operators, logical operators, and many functions are also vectorized: Comparison operators x > 2  [1] FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE  Logical operators a <- x > 3 # or, for clarity, a <- (x > 3) a  [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE  ## Tip: some useful functions for logical vectors any() will return TRUE if any element of a vector is TRUE. all() will return TRUE if all elements of a vector are TRUE. Most functions also operate element-wise on vectors: Functions x <- 1:4 log(x)  [1] 0.0000000 0.6931472 1.0986123 1.3862944  Vectorized operations work element-wise on matrices: m <- matrix(1:12, nrow=3, ncol=4) m * -1   [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [1,] -1 -4 -7 -10 [2,] -2 -5 -8 -11 [3,] -3 -6 -9 -12  ## Tip: element-wise vs. matrix multiplication Very important: the operator * gives you element-wise multiplication! To do matrix multiplication, we need to use the %*% operator: m %*% matrix(1, nrow=4, ncol=1)   [,1] [1,] 22 [2,] 26 [3,] 30  matrix(1:4, nrow=1) %*% matrix(1:4, ncol=1)   [,1] [1,] 30  For more on matrix algebra, see the Quick-R reference guide ## Challenge 3 Given the following matrix: m <- matrix(1:12, nrow=3, ncol=4) m   [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [1,] 1 4 7 10 [2,] 2 5 8 11 [3,] 3 6 9 12  Write down what you think will happen when you run: 1. m ^ -1 2. m * c(1, 0, -1) 3. m > c(0, 20) 4. m * c(1, 0, -1, 2) Did you get the output you expected? If not, ask a helper! ## Solution to challenge 3 Given the following matrix: m <- matrix(1:12, nrow=3, ncol=4) m   [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [1,] 1 4 7 10 [2,] 2 5 8 11 [3,] 3 6 9 12  Write down what you think will happen when you run: 1. m ^ -1  [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [1,] 1.0000000 0.2500000 0.1428571 0.10000000 [2,] 0.5000000 0.2000000 0.1250000 0.09090909 [3,] 0.3333333 0.1666667 0.1111111 0.08333333  1. m * c(1, 0, -1)  [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [1,] 1 4 7 10 [2,] 0 0 0 0 [3,] -3 -6 -9 -12  1. m > c(0, 20)  [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [1,] TRUE FALSE TRUE FALSE [2,] FALSE TRUE FALSE TRUE [3,] TRUE FALSE TRUE FALSE  ## Challenge 4 We’re interested in looking at the sum of the following sequence of fractions:  x = 1/(1^2) + 1/(2^2) + 1/(3^2) + ... + 1/(n^2)  This would be tedious to type out, and impossible for high values of n. Use vectorisation to compute x when n=100. What is the sum when n=10,000? ## Challenge 4 We’re interested in looking at the sum of the following sequence of fractions:  x = 1/(1^2) + 1/(2^2) + 1/(3^2) + ... + 1/(n^2)  This would be tedious to type out, and impossible for high values of n. Can you use vectorisation to compute x, when n=100? How about when n=10,000? sum(1/(1:100)^2)  [1] 1.634984  sum(1/(1:1e04)^2)  [1] 1.644834  n <- 10000 sum(1/(1:n)^2)  [1] 1.644834  We can also obtain the same results using a function: inverse_sum_of_squares <- function(n) { sum(1/(1:n)^2) } inverse_sum_of_squares(100)  [1] 1.634984  inverse_sum_of_squares(10000)  [1] 1.644834  n <- 10000 inverse_sum_of_squares(n)  [1] 1.644834  ## Key Points • Use vectorized operations instead of loops. # Functions Explained ## Overview Teaching: 45 min Exercises: 15 min Questions • How can I write a new function in R? Objectives • Define a function that takes arguments. • Return a value from a function. • Check argument conditions with stopifnot() in functions. • Test a function. • Set default values for function arguments. • Explain why we should divide programs into small, single-purpose functions. If we only had one data set to analyze, it would probably be faster to load the file into a spreadsheet and use that to plot simple statistics. However, the gapminder data is updated periodically, and we may want to pull in that new information later and re-run our analysis again. We may also obtain similar data from a different source in the future. In this lesson, we’ll learn how to write a function so that we can repeat several operations with a single command. ## What is a function? Functions gather a sequence of operations into a whole, preserving it for ongoing use. Functions provide: • a name we can remember and invoke it by • relief from the need to remember the individual operations • a defined set of inputs and expected outputs • rich connections to the larger programming environment As the basic building block of most programming languages, user-defined functions constitute “programming” as much as any single abstraction can. If you have written a function, you are a computer programmer. ## Defining a function Let’s open a new R script file in the functions/ directory and call it functions-lesson.R. Let’s define a function fahr_to_kelvin() that converts temperatures from Fahrenheit to Kelvin: fahr_to_kelvin <- function(temp) { kelvin <- ((temp - 32) * (5 / 9)) + 273.15 return(kelvin) }  We define fahr_to_kelvin() by assigning it to the output of function. The list of argument names are contained within parentheses. Next, the body of the function–the statements that are executed when it runs–is contained within curly braces ({}). The statements in the body are indented by two spaces. This makes the code easier to read but does not affect how the code operates. It is useful to think of creating functions like writing a cookbook. First you define the “ingredients” that your function needs. In this case, we only need one ingredient to use our function: “temp”. After we list our ingredients, we then say what we will do with them, in this case, we are taking our ingredient and applying a set of mathematical operators to it. When we call the function, the values we pass to it as arguments are assigned to those variables so that we can use them inside the function. Inside the function, we use a return statement to send a result back to whoever asked for it. ## Tip One feature unique to R is that the return statement is not required. R automatically returns whichever variable is on the last line of the body of the function. But for clarity, we will explicitly define the return statement. Let’s try running our function. Calling our own function is no different from calling any other function: # freezing point of water fahr_to_kelvin(32)  [1] 273.15  # boiling point of water fahr_to_kelvin(212)  [1] 373.15  ## Challenge 1 Write a function called kelvin_to_celsius() that takes a temperature in Kelvin and returns that temperature in Celsius. Hint: To convert from Kelvin to Celsius you subtract 273.15 ## Solution to challenge 1 Write a function called kelvin_to_celsius that takes a temperature in Kelvin and returns that temperature in Celsius kelvin_to_celsius <- function(temp) { celsius <- temp - 273.15 return(celsius) }  ## Combining functions The real power of functions comes from mixing, matching and combining them into ever-larger chunks to get the effect we want. Let’s define two functions that will convert temperature from Fahrenheit to Kelvin, and Kelvin to Celsius: fahr_to_kelvin <- function(temp) { kelvin <- ((temp - 32) * (5 / 9)) + 273.15 return(kelvin) } kelvin_to_celsius <- function(temp) { celsius <- temp - 273.15 return(celsius) }  ## Challenge 2 Define the function to convert directly from Fahrenheit to Celsius, by reusing the two functions above (or using your own functions if you prefer). ## Solution to challenge 2 Define the function to convert directly from Fahrenheit to Celsius, by reusing these two functions above fahr_to_celsius <- function(temp) { temp_k <- fahr_to_kelvin(temp) result <- kelvin_to_celsius(temp_k) return(result) }  ## Interlude: Defensive Programming Now that we’ve begun to appreciate how writing functions provides an efficient way to make R code re-usable and modular, we should note that it is important to ensure that functions only work in their intended use-cases. Checking function parameters is related to the concept of defensive programming. Defensive programming encourages us to frequently check conditions and throw an error if something is wrong. These checks are referred to as assertion statements because we want to assert some condition is TRUE before proceeding. They make it easier to debug because they give us a better idea of where the errors originate. ### Checking conditions with stopifnot() Let’s start by re-examining fahr_to_kelvin(), our function for converting temperatures from Fahrenheit to Kelvin. It was defined like so: fahr_to_kelvin <- function(temp) { kelvin <- ((temp - 32) * (5 / 9)) + 273.15 return(kelvin) }  For this function to work as intended, the argument temp must be a numeric value; otherwise, the mathematical procedure for converting between the two temperature scales will not work. To create an error, we can use the function stop(). For example, since the argument temp must be a numeric vector, we could check for this condition with an if statement and throw an error if the condition was violated. We could augment our function above like so: fahr_to_kelvin <- function(temp) { if (!is.numeric(temp)) { stop("temp must be a numeric vector.") } kelvin <- ((temp - 32) * (5 / 9)) + 273.15 return(kelvin) }  If we had multiple conditions or arguments to check, it would take many lines of code to check all of them. Luckily R provides the convenience function stopifnot(). We can list as many requirements that should evaluate to TRUE; stopifnot() throws an error if it finds one that is FALSE. Listing these conditions also serves a secondary purpose as extra documentation for the function. Let’s try out defensive programming with stopifnot() by adding assertions to check the input to our function fahr_to_kelvin(). We want to assert the following: temp is a numeric vector. We may do that like so: fahr_to_kelvin <- function(temp) { stopifnot(is.numeric(temp)) kelvin <- ((temp - 32) * (5 / 9)) + 273.15 return(kelvin) }  It still works when given proper input. # freezing point of water fahr_to_kelvin(temp = 32)  [1] 273.15  But fails instantly if given improper input. # Metric is a factor instead of numeric fahr_to_kelvin(temp = as.factor(32))  Error in fahr_to_kelvin(temp = as.factor(32)): is.numeric(temp) is not TRUE  ## Challenge 3 Use defensive programming to ensure that our fahr_to_celsius() function throws an error immediately if the argument temp is specified inappropriately. ## Solution to challenge 3 Extend our previous definition of the function by adding in an explicit call to stopifnot(). Since fahr_to_celsius() is a composition of two other functions, checking inside here makes adding checks to the two component functions redundant. fahr_to_celsius <- function(temp) { stopifnot(is.numeric(temp)) temp_k <- fahr_to_kelvin(temp) result <- kelvin_to_celsius(temp_k) return(result) }  ## More on combining functions Now, we’re going to define a function that calculates the Gross Domestic Product of a nation from the data available in our dataset: # Takes a dataset and multiplies the population column # with the GDP per capita column. calcGDP <- function(dat) { gdp <- dat$pop * dat$gdpPercap return(gdp) }  We define calcGDP() by assigning it to the output of function. The list of argument names are contained within parentheses. Next, the body of the function – the statements executed when you call the function – is contained within curly braces ({}). We’ve indented the statements in the body by two spaces. This makes the code easier to read but does not affect how it operates. When we call the function, the values we pass to it are assigned to the arguments, which become variables inside the body of the function. Inside the function, we use the return() function to send back the result. This return() function is optional: R will automatically return the results of whatever command is executed on the last line of the function. calcGDP(head(gapminder))  [1] 6567086330 7585448670 8758855797 9648014150 9678553274 11697659231  That’s not very informative. Let’s add some more arguments so we can extract that per year and country. # Takes a dataset and multiplies the population column # with the GDP per capita column. calcGDP <- function(dat, year=NULL, country=NULL) { if(!is.null(year)) { dat <- dat[dat$year %in% year, ]
}
if (!is.null(country)) {
dat <- dat[dat$country %in% country,] } gdp <- dat$pop * dat$gdpPercap new <- cbind(dat, gdp=gdp) return(new) }  If you’ve been writing these functions down into a separate R script (a good idea!), you can load in the functions into our R session by using the source() function: source("functions/functions-lesson.R")  Ok, so there’s a lot going on in this function now. In plain English, the function now subsets the provided data by year if the year argument isn’t empty, then subsets the result by country if the country argument isn’t empty. Then it calculates the GDP for whatever subset emerges from the previous two steps. The function then adds the GDP as a new column to the subsetted data and returns this as the final result. You can see that the output is much more informative than a vector of numbers. Let’s take a look at what happens when we specify the year: head(calcGDP(gapminder, year=2007))   country year pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap gdp 12 Afghanistan 2007 31889923 Asia 43.828 974.5803 31079291949 24 Albania 2007 3600523 Europe 76.423 5937.0295 21376411360 36 Algeria 2007 33333216 Africa 72.301 6223.3675 207444851958 48 Angola 2007 12420476 Africa 42.731 4797.2313 59583895818 60 Argentina 2007 40301927 Americas 75.320 12779.3796 515033625357 72 Australia 2007 20434176 Oceania 81.235 34435.3674 703658358894  Or for a specific country: calcGDP(gapminder, country="Australia")   country year pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap gdp 61 Australia 1952 8691212 Oceania 69.120 10039.60 87256254102 62 Australia 1957 9712569 Oceania 70.330 10949.65 106349227169 63 Australia 1962 10794968 Oceania 70.930 12217.23 131884573002 64 Australia 1967 11872264 Oceania 71.100 14526.12 172457986742 65 Australia 1972 13177000 Oceania 71.930 16788.63 221223770658 66 Australia 1977 14074100 Oceania 73.490 18334.20 258037329175 67 Australia 1982 15184200 Oceania 74.740 19477.01 295742804309 68 Australia 1987 16257249 Oceania 76.320 21888.89 355853119294 69 Australia 1992 17481977 Oceania 77.560 23424.77 409511234952 70 Australia 1997 18565243 Oceania 78.830 26997.94 501223252921 71 Australia 2002 19546792 Oceania 80.370 30687.75 599847158654 72 Australia 2007 20434176 Oceania 81.235 34435.37 703658358894  Or both: calcGDP(gapminder, year=2007, country="Australia")   country year pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap gdp 72 Australia 2007 20434176 Oceania 81.235 34435.37 703658358894  Let’s walk through the body of the function: calcGDP <- function(dat, year=NULL, country=NULL) {  Here we’ve added two arguments, year, and country. We’ve set default arguments for both as NULL using the = operator in the function definition. This means that those arguments will take on those values unless the user specifies otherwise.  if(!is.null(year)) { dat <- dat[dat$year %in% year, ]
}
if (!is.null(country)) {
dat <- dat[dat$country %in% country,] }  Here, we check whether each additional argument is set to null, and whenever they’re not null overwrite the dataset stored in dat with a subset given by the non-null argument. Building these conditionals into the function makes it more flexible for later. Now, we can use it to calculate the GDP for: • The whole dataset; • A single year; • A single country; • A single combination of year and country. By using %in% instead, we can also give multiple years or countries to those arguments. ## Tip: Pass by value Functions in R almost always make copies of the data to operate on inside of a function body. When we modify dat inside the function we are modifying the copy of the gapminder dataset stored in dat, not the original variable we gave as the first argument. This is called “pass-by-value” and it makes writing code much safer: you can always be sure that whatever changes you make within the body of the function, stay inside the body of the function. ## Tip: Function scope Another important concept is scoping: any variables (or functions!) you create or modify inside the body of a function only exist for the lifetime of the function’s execution. When we call calcGDP(), the variables dat, gdp and new only exist inside the body of the function. Even if we have variables of the same name in our interactive R session, they are not modified in any way when executing a function.  gdp <- dat$pop * dat$gdpPercap new <- cbind(dat, gdp=gdp) return(new) }  Finally, we calculated the GDP on our new subset, and created a new data frame with that column added. This means when we call the function later we can see the context for the returned GDP values, which is much better than in our first attempt where we got a vector of numbers. ## Challenge 4 Test out your GDP function by calculating the GDP for New Zealand in 1987. How does this differ from New Zealand’s GDP in 1952? ## Solution to challenge 4  calcGDP(gapminder, year = c(1952, 1987), country = "New Zealand")  GDP for New Zealand in 1987: 65050008703 GDP for New Zealand in 1952: 21058193787 ## Challenge 5 The paste() function can be used to combine text together, e.g: best_practice <- c("Write", "programs", "for", "people", "not", "computers") paste(best_practice, collapse=" ")  [1] "Write programs for people not computers"  Write a function called fence() that takes two vectors as arguments, called text and wrapper, and prints out the text wrapped with the wrapper: fence(text=best_practice, wrapper="***")  Note: the paste() function has an argument called sep, which specifies the separator between text. The default is a space: “ “. The default for paste0() is no space “”. ## Solution to challenge 5 Write a function called fence() that takes two vectors as arguments, called text and wrapper, and prints out the text wrapped with the wrapper: fence <- function(text, wrapper){ text <- c(wrapper, text, wrapper) result <- paste(text, collapse = " ") return(result) } best_practice <- c("Write", "programs", "for", "people", "not", "computers") fence(text=best_practice, wrapper="***")  [1] "*** Write programs for people not computers ***"  ## Tip R has some unique aspects that can be exploited when performing more complicated operations. We will not be writing anything that requires knowledge of these more advanced concepts. In the future when you are comfortable writing functions in R, you can learn more by reading the R Language Manual or this chapter from Advanced R Programming by Hadley Wickham. ## Tip: Testing and documenting It’s important to both test functions and document them: Documentation helps you, and others, understand what the purpose of your function is, and how to use it, and its important to make sure that your function actually does what you think. When you first start out, your workflow will probably look a lot like this: 1. Write a function 2. Comment parts of the function to document its behaviour 3. Load in the source file 4. Experiment with it in the console to make sure it behaves as you expect 5. Make any necessary bug fixes 6. Rinse and repeat. Formal documentation for functions, written in separate .Rd files, gets turned into the documentation you see in help files. The roxygen2 package allows R coders to write documentation alongside the function code and then process it into the appropriate .Rd files. You will want to switch to this more formal method of writing documentation when you start writing more complicated R projects. Formal automated tests can be written using the testthat package. ## Key Points • Use function to define a new function in R. • Use parameters to pass values into functions. • Use stopifnot() to flexibly check function arguments in R. • Load functions into programs using source(). # Writing Data ## Overview Teaching: 10 min Exercises: 10 min Questions • How can I save plots and data created in R? Objectives • To be able to write out plots and data from R. ## Saving plots You have already seen how to save the most recent plot you create in ggplot2, using the command ggsave. As a refresher: ggsave("My_most_recent_plot.pdf")  You can save a plot from within RStudio using the ‘Export’ button in the ‘Plot’ window. This will give you the option of saving as a .pdf or as .png, .jpg or other image formats. Sometimes you will want to save plots without creating them in the ‘Plot’ window first. Perhaps you want to make a pdf document with multiple pages: each one a different plot, for example. Or perhaps you’re looping through multiple subsets of a file, plotting data from each subset, and you want to save each plot, but obviously can’t stop the loop to click ‘Export’ for each one. In this case you can use a more flexible approach. The function pdf creates a new pdf device. You can control the size and resolution using the arguments to this function. pdf("Life_Exp_vs_time.pdf", width=12, height=4) ggplot(data=gapminder, aes(x=year, y=lifeExp, colour=country)) + geom_line() + theme(legend.position = "none") # You then have to make sure to turn off the pdf device! dev.off()  Open up this document and have a look. ## Challenge 1 Rewrite your ‘pdf’ command to print a second page in the pdf, showing a facet plot (hint: use facet_grid) of the same data with one panel per continent. ## Solution to challenge 1 pdf("Life_Exp_vs_time.pdf", width = 12, height = 4) p <- ggplot(data = gapminder, aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, colour = country)) + geom_line() + theme(legend.position = "none") p p + facet_grid(. ~continent) dev.off()  The commands jpeg, png etc. are used similarly to produce documents in different formats. ## Writing data At some point, you’ll also want to write out data from R. We can use the write.table function for this, which is very similar to read.table from before. Let’s create a data-cleaning script, for this analysis, we only want to focus on the gapminder data for Australia: aust_subset <- gapminder[gapminder$country == "Australia",]

write.table(aust_subset,
file="cleaned-data/gapminder-aus.csv",
sep=","
)


Let’s switch back to the shell to take a look at the data to make sure it looks OK:

head cleaned-data/gapminder-aus.csv

"country","year","pop","continent","lifeExp","gdpPercap"
"61","Australia",1952,8691212,"Oceania",69.12,10039.59564
"62","Australia",1957,9712569,"Oceania",70.33,10949.64959
"63","Australia",1962,10794968,"Oceania",70.93,12217.22686
"64","Australia",1967,11872264,"Oceania",71.1,14526.12465
"65","Australia",1972,13177000,"Oceania",71.93,16788.62948
"66","Australia",1977,14074100,"Oceania",73.49,18334.19751
"67","Australia",1982,15184200,"Oceania",74.74,19477.00928
"68","Australia",1987,16257249,"Oceania",76.32,21888.88903
"69","Australia",1992,17481977,"Oceania",77.56,23424.76683


Hmm, that’s not quite what we wanted. Where did all these quotation marks come from? Also the row numbers are meaningless.

Let’s look at the help file to work out how to change this behaviour.

?write.table


By default R will wrap character vectors with quotation marks when writing out to file. It will also write out the row and column names.

Let’s fix this:

write.table(
gapminder[gapminder$country == "Australia",], file="cleaned-data/gapminder-aus.csv", sep=",", quote=FALSE, row.names=FALSE )  Now lets look at the data again using our shell skills: head cleaned-data/gapminder-aus.csv  country,year,pop,continent,lifeExp,gdpPercap Australia,1952,8691212,Oceania,69.12,10039.59564 Australia,1957,9712569,Oceania,70.33,10949.64959 Australia,1962,10794968,Oceania,70.93,12217.22686 Australia,1967,11872264,Oceania,71.1,14526.12465 Australia,1972,13177000,Oceania,71.93,16788.62948 Australia,1977,14074100,Oceania,73.49,18334.19751 Australia,1982,15184200,Oceania,74.74,19477.00928 Australia,1987,16257249,Oceania,76.32,21888.88903 Australia,1992,17481977,Oceania,77.56,23424.76683  That looks better! ## Challenge 2 Write a data-cleaning script file that subsets the gapminder data to include only data points collected since 1990. Use this script to write out the new subset to a file in the cleaned-data/ directory. ## Solution to challenge 2 write.table( gapminder[gapminder$year > 1990, ],
file = "cleaned-data/gapminder-after1990.csv",
sep = ",", quote = FALSE, row.names = FALSE
)


## Key Points

• Save plots from RStudio using the ‘Export’ button.

• Use write.table to save tabular data.

# Splitting and Combining Data Frames with plyr

## Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 30 min
Questions
• How can I do different calculations on different sets of data?

Objectives
• To be able to use the split-apply-combine strategy for data analysis.

Previously we looked at how you can use functions to simplify your code. We defined the calcGDP function, which takes the gapminder dataset, and multiplies the population and GDP per capita column. We also defined additional arguments so we could filter by year and country:

# Takes a dataset and multiplies the population column
# with the GDP per capita column.
calcGDP <- function(dat, year=NULL, country=NULL) {
if(!is.null(year)) {
dat <- dat[dat$year %in% year, ] } if (!is.null(country)) { dat <- dat[dat$country %in% country,]
}
gdp <- dat$pop * dat$gdpPercap

new <- cbind(dat, gdp=gdp)
return(new)
}


A common task you’ll encounter when working with data, is that you’ll want to run calculations on different groups within the data. In the above, we were calculating the GDP by multiplying two columns together. But what if we wanted to calculated the mean GDP per continent?

We could run calcGDP and then take the mean of each continent:

withGDP <- calcGDP(gapminder)
mean(withGDP[withGDP$continent == "Africa", "gdp"])  [1] 20904782844  mean(withGDP[withGDP$continent == "Americas", "gdp"])

[1] 379262350210

mean(withGDP[withGDP$continent == "Asia", "gdp"])  [1] 227233738153  But this isn’t very nice. Yes, by using a function, you have reduced a substantial amount of repetition. That is nice. But there is still repetition. Repeating yourself will cost you time, both now and later, and potentially introduce some nasty bugs. We could write a new function that is flexible like calcGDP, but this also takes a substantial amount of effort and testing to get right. The abstract problem we’re encountering here is know as “split-apply-combine”: We want to split our data into groups, in this case continents, apply some calculations on that group, then optionally combine the results together afterwards. ## The plyr package For those of you who have used R before, you might be familiar with the apply family of functions. While R’s built in functions do work, we’re going to introduce you to another method for solving the “split-apply-combine” problem. The plyr package provides a set of functions that we find more user friendly for solving this problem. We installed this package in an earlier challenge. Let’s load it now: library("plyr")  Plyr has functions for operating on lists, data.frames and arrays (matrices, or n-dimensional vectors). Each function performs: 1. A splitting operation 2. Apply a function on each split in turn. 3. Recombine output data as a single data object. The functions are named based on the data structure they expect as input, and the data structure you want returned as output: [a]rray, [l]ist, or [d]ata.frame. The first letter corresponds to the input data structure, the second letter to the output data structure, and then the rest of the function is named “ply”. This gives us 9 core functions **ply. There are an additional three functions which will only perform the split and apply steps, and not any combine step. They’re named by their input data type and represent null output by a _ (see table) Note here that plyr’s use of “array” is different to R’s, an array in ply can include a vector or matrix. Each of the xxply functions (daply, ddply, llply, laply, …) has the same structure and has 4 key features and structure: xxply(.data, .variables, .fun)  • The first letter of the function name gives the input type and the second gives the output type. • .data - gives the data object to be processed • .variables - identifies the splitting variables • .fun - gives the function to be called on each piece Now we can quickly calculate the mean GDP per continent: ddply( .data = calcGDP(gapminder), .variables = "continent", .fun = function(x) mean(x$gdp)
)

  continent           V1
1    Africa  20904782844
2  Americas 379262350210
3      Asia 227233738153
4    Europe 269442085301
5   Oceania 188187105354


Let’s walk through the previous code:

• The ddply function feeds in a data.frame (function starts with d) and returns another data.frame (2nd letter is a d) i
• the first argument we gave was the data.frame we wanted to operate on: in this case the gapminder data. We called calcGDP on it first so that it would have the additional gdp column added to it.
• The second argument indicated our split criteria: in this case the “continent” column. Note that we gave the name of the column, not the values of the column like we had done previously with subsetting. Plyr takes care of these implementation details for you.
• The third argument is the function we want to apply to each grouping of the data. We had to define our own short function here: each subset of the data gets stored in x, the first argument of our function. This is an anonymous function: we haven’t defined it elsewhere, and it has no name. It only exists in the scope of our call to ddply.

## Challenge 1

Calculate the average life expectancy per continent. Which has the longest? Which had the shortest?

## Solution to Challenge 1

ddply(
.data = gapminder,
.variables = "continent",
.fun = function(x) mean(x$lifeExp) )  Oceania has the longest and Africa the shortest. What if we want a different type of output data structure?: dlply( .data = calcGDP(gapminder), .variables = "continent", .fun = function(x) mean(x$gdp)
)

$Africa [1] 20904782844$Americas
[1] 379262350210

$Asia [1] 227233738153$Europe
[1] 269442085301

$Oceania [1] 188187105354 attr(,"split_type") [1] "data.frame" attr(,"split_labels") continent 1 Africa 2 Americas 3 Asia 4 Europe 5 Oceania  We called the same function again, but changed the second letter to an l, so the output was returned as a list. We can specify multiple columns to group by: ddply( .data = calcGDP(gapminder), .variables = c("continent", "year"), .fun = function(x) mean(x$gdp)
)

   continent year           V1
1     Africa 1952   5992294608
2     Africa 1957   7359188796
3     Africa 1962   8784876958
4     Africa 1967  11443994101
5     Africa 1972  15072241974
6     Africa 1977  18694898732
7     Africa 1982  22040401045
8     Africa 1987  24107264108
9     Africa 1992  26256977719
10    Africa 1997  30023173824
11    Africa 2002  35303511424
12    Africa 2007  45778570846
13  Americas 1952 117738997171
14  Americas 1957 140817061264
15  Americas 1962 169153069442
16  Americas 1967 217867530844
17  Americas 1972 268159178814
18  Americas 1977 324085389022
19  Americas 1982 363314008350
20  Americas 1987 439447790357
21  Americas 1992 489899820623
22  Americas 1997 582693307146
23  Americas 2002 661248623419
24  Americas 2007 776723426068
25      Asia 1952  34095762661
26      Asia 1957  47267432088
27      Asia 1962  60136869012
28      Asia 1967  84648519224
29      Asia 1972 124385747313
30      Asia 1977 159802590186
31      Asia 1982 194429049919
32      Asia 1987 241784763369
33      Asia 1992 307100497486
34      Asia 1997 387597655323
35      Asia 2002 458042336179
36      Asia 2007 627513635079
37    Europe 1952  84971341466
38    Europe 1957 109989505140
39    Europe 1962 138984693095
40    Europe 1967 173366641137
41    Europe 1972 218691462733
42    Europe 1977 255367522034
43    Europe 1982 279484077072
44    Europe 1987 316507473546
45    Europe 1992 342703247405
46    Europe 1997 383606933833
47    Europe 2002 436448815097
48    Europe 2007 493183311052
49   Oceania 1952  54157223944
50   Oceania 1957  66826828013
51   Oceania 1962  82336453245
52   Oceania 1967 105958863585
53   Oceania 1972 134112109227
54   Oceania 1977 154707711162
55   Oceania 1982 176177151380
56   Oceania 1987 209451563998
57   Oceania 1992 236319179826
58   Oceania 1997 289304255183
59   Oceania 2002 345236880176
60   Oceania 2007 403657044512

daply(
.data = calcGDP(gapminder),
.variables = c("continent", "year"),
.fun = function(x) mean(x$gdp) )   year continent 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 Africa 5992294608 7359188796 8784876958 11443994101 15072241974 Americas 117738997171 140817061264 169153069442 217867530844 268159178814 Asia 34095762661 47267432088 60136869012 84648519224 124385747313 Europe 84971341466 109989505140 138984693095 173366641137 218691462733 Oceania 54157223944 66826828013 82336453245 105958863585 134112109227 year continent 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 Africa 18694898732 22040401045 24107264108 26256977719 30023173824 Americas 324085389022 363314008350 439447790357 489899820623 582693307146 Asia 159802590186 194429049919 241784763369 307100497486 387597655323 Europe 255367522034 279484077072 316507473546 342703247405 383606933833 Oceania 154707711162 176177151380 209451563998 236319179826 289304255183 year continent 2002 2007 Africa 35303511424 45778570846 Americas 661248623419 776723426068 Asia 458042336179 627513635079 Europe 436448815097 493183311052 Oceania 345236880176 403657044512  You can use these functions in place of for loops (and it is usually faster to do so). To replace a for loop, put the code that was in the body of the for loop inside an anonymous function. d_ply( .data=gapminder, .variables = "continent", .fun = function(x) { meanGDPperCap <- mean(x$gdpPercap)
print(paste(
"The mean GDP per capita for", unique(x$continent), "is", format(meanGDPperCap, big.mark=",") )) } )  [1] "The mean GDP per capita for Africa is 2,193.755" [1] "The mean GDP per capita for Americas is 7,136.11" [1] "The mean GDP per capita for Asia is 7,902.15" [1] "The mean GDP per capita for Europe is 14,469.48" [1] "The mean GDP per capita for Oceania is 18,621.61"  ## Tip: printing numbers The format function can be used to make numeric values “pretty” for printing out in messages. ## Challenge 2 Calculate the average life expectancy per continent and year. Which had the longest and shortest in 2007? Which had the greatest change in between 1952 and 2007? ## Solution to Challenge 2 solution <- ddply( .data = gapminder, .variables = c("continent", "year"), .fun = function(x) mean(x$lifeExp)
)
solution_2007 <- solution[solution$year == 2007, ] solution_2007  Oceania had the longest average life expectancy in 2007 and Africa the lowest. solution_1952_2007 <- cbind(solution[solution$year == 1952, ], solution_2007)
difference_1952_2007 <- data.frame(continent = solution_1952_2007$continent, year_1957 = solution_1952_2007[[3]], year_2007 = solution_1952_2007[[6]], difference = solution_1952_2007[[6]] - solution_1952_2007[[3]]) difference_1952_2007  Asia had the greatest difference, and Oceania the least. ## Alternate Challenge Without running them, which of the following will calculate the average life expectancy per continent: 1. ddply( .data = gapminder, .variables = gapminder$continent,
.fun = function(dataGroup) {
mean(dataGroup$lifeExp) } )  2. ddply( .data = gapminder, .variables = "continent", .fun = mean(dataGroup$lifeExp)
)


3.

ddply(
.data = gapminder,
.variables = "continent",
.fun = function(dataGroup) {
mean(dataGroup$lifeExp) } )  4. adply( .data = gapminder, .variables = "continent", .fun = function(dataGroup) { mean(dataGroup$lifeExp)
}
)


## Solution to Alternative Challenge

Answer 3 will calculate the average life expectancy per continent.

## Key Points

• Use the plyr package to split data, apply functions to subsets, and combine the results.

# Data frame Manipulation with dplyr

## Overview

Teaching: 40 min
Exercises: 15 min
Questions
• How can I manipulate data frames without repeating myself?

Objectives
• To be able to use the six main data frame manipulation ‘verbs’ with pipes in dplyr.

• To understand how group_by() and summarize() can be combined to summarize datasets.

• Be able to analyze a subset of data using logical filtering.

Manipulation of data frames means many things to many researchers, we often select certain observations (rows) or variables (columns), we often group the data by a certain variable(s), or we even calculate summary statistics. We can do these operations using the normal base R operations:

mean(gapminder[gapminder$continent == "Africa", "gdpPercap"])  [1] 2193.755  mean(gapminder[gapminder$continent == "Americas", "gdpPercap"])

[1] 7136.11

mean(gapminder[gapminder$continent == "Asia", "gdpPercap"])  [1] 7902.15  But this isn’t very nice because there is a fair bit of repetition. Repeating yourself will cost you time, both now and later, and potentially introduce some nasty bugs. ## The dplyr package Luckily, the dplyr package provides a number of very useful functions for manipulating data frames in a way that will reduce the above repetition, reduce the probability of making errors, and probably even save you some typing. As an added bonus, you might even find the dplyr grammar easier to read. Here we’re going to cover 5 of the most commonly used functions as well as using pipes (%>%) to combine them. 1. select() 2. filter() 3. group_by() 4. summarize() 5. mutate() If you have have not installed this package earlier, please do so: install.packages('dplyr')  Now let’s load the package: library("dplyr")  ## Using select() If, for example, we wanted to move forward with only a few of the variables in our data frame we could use the select() function. This will keep only the variables you select. year_country_gdp <- select(gapminder, year, country, gdpPercap)  If we open up year_country_gdp we’ll see that it only contains the year, country and gdpPercap. Above we used ‘normal’ grammar, but the strengths of dplyr lie in combining several functions using pipes. Since the pipes grammar is unlike anything we’ve seen in R before, let’s repeat what we’ve done above using pipes. year_country_gdp <- gapminder %>% select(year, country, gdpPercap)  To help you understand why we wrote that in that way, let’s walk through it step by step. First we summon the gapminder data frame and pass it on, using the pipe symbol %>%, to the next step, which is the select() function. In this case we don’t specify which data object we use in the select() function since in gets that from the previous pipe. Fun Fact: There is a good chance you have encountered pipes before in the shell. In R, a pipe symbol is %>% while in the shell it is | but the concept is the same! ## Tip: Renaming data frame columns in dplyr In Chapter 4 we covered how you can rename columns with base R by assigning a value to the output of the names() function. Just like select, this is a bit cumbersome, but thankfully dplyr has a rename() function. Within a pipeline, the syntax is rename(new_name = old_name). For example, we may want to rename the gdpPercap column name from our select() statement above. tidy_gdp <- year_country_gdp %>% rename(gdp_per_capita = gdpPercap) head(tidy_gdp)   year country gdp_per_capita 1 1952 Afghanistan 779.4453 2 1957 Afghanistan 820.8530 3 1962 Afghanistan 853.1007 4 1967 Afghanistan 836.1971 5 1972 Afghanistan 739.9811 6 1977 Afghanistan 786.1134  ## Using filter() If we now wanted to move forward with the above, but only with European countries, we can combine select and filter year_country_gdp_euro <- gapminder %>% filter(continent == "Europe") %>% select(year, country, gdpPercap)  ## Challenge 1 Write a single command (which can span multiple lines and includes pipes) that will produce a data frame that has the African values for lifeExp, country and year, but not for other Continents. How many rows does your data frame have and why? ## Solution to Challenge 1 year_country_lifeExp_Africa <- gapminder %>% filter(continent == "Africa") %>% select(year, country, lifeExp)  As with last time, first we pass the gapminder data frame to the filter() function, then we pass the filtered version of the gapminder data frame to the select() function. Note: The order of operations is very important in this case. If we used ‘select’ first, filter would not be able to find the variable continent since we would have removed it in the previous step. ## Using group_by() and summarize() Now, we were supposed to be reducing the error prone repetitiveness of what can be done with base R, but up to now we haven’t done that since we would have to repeat the above for each continent. Instead of filter(), which will only pass observations that meet your criteria (in the above: continent=="Europe"), we can use group_by(), which will essentially use every unique criteria that you could have used in filter. str(gapminder)  'data.frame': 1704 obs. of 6 variables:$ country  : chr  "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" ...
$year : int 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 ...$ pop      : num  8425333 9240934 10267083 11537966 13079460 ...
$continent: chr "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" ...$ lifeExp  : num  28.8 30.3 32 34 36.1 ...
$gdpPercap: num 779 821 853 836 740 ...  str(gapminder %>% group_by(continent))  tibble [1,704 × 6] (S3: grouped_df/tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)$ country  : chr [1:1704] "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" ...
$year : int [1:1704] 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 ...$ pop      : num [1:1704] 8425333 9240934 10267083 11537966 13079460 ...
$continent: chr [1:1704] "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" ...$ lifeExp  : num [1:1704] 28.8 30.3 32 34 36.1 ...
$gdpPercap: num [1:1704] 779 821 853 836 740 ... - attr(*, "groups")= tibble [5 × 2] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame) ..$ continent: chr [1:5] "Africa" "Americas" "Asia" "Europe" ...
..$.rows : list<int> [1:5] .. ..$ : int [1:624] 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 ...
.. ..$: int [1:300] 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 ... .. ..$ : int [1:396] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
.. ..$: int [1:360] 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 ... .. ..$ : int [1:24] 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 ...
.. ..@ ptype: int(0)
..- attr(*, ".drop")= logi TRUE


You will notice that the structure of the data frame where we used group_by() (grouped_df) is not the same as the original gapminder (data.frame). A grouped_df can be thought of as a list where each item in the listis a data.frame which contains only the rows that correspond to the a particular value continent (at least in the example above).

## Using summarize()

The above was a bit on the uneventful side but group_by() is much more exciting in conjunction with summarize(). This will allow us to create new variable(s) by using functions that repeat for each of the continent-specific data frames. That is to say, using the group_by() function, we split our original data frame into multiple pieces, then we can run functions (e.g. mean() or sd()) within summarize().

gdp_bycontinents <- gapminder %>%
group_by(continent) %>%
summarize(mean_gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap))


continent mean_gdpPercap
<fctr>          <dbl>
1    Africa       2193.755
2  Americas       7136.110
3      Asia       7902.150
4    Europe      14469.476
5   Oceania      18621.609


That allowed us to calculate the mean gdpPercap for each continent, but it gets even better.

## Challenge 2

Calculate the average life expectancy per country. Which has the longest average life expectancy and which has the shortest average life expectancy?

## Solution to Challenge 2

lifeExp_bycountry <- gapminder %>%
group_by(country) %>%
summarize(mean_lifeExp = mean(lifeExp))
lifeExp_bycountry %>%
filter(mean_lifeExp == min(mean_lifeExp) | mean_lifeExp == max(mean_lifeExp))

# A tibble: 2 x 2
country      mean_lifeExp
<chr>               <dbl>
1 Iceland              76.5
2 Sierra Leone         36.8


Another way to do this is to use the dplyr function arrange(), which arranges the rows in a data frame according to the order of one or more variables from the data frame. It has similar syntax to other functions from the dplyr package. You can use desc() inside arrange() to sort in descending order.

lifeExp_bycountry %>%
arrange(mean_lifeExp) %>%

# A tibble: 1 x 2
country      mean_lifeExp
<chr>               <dbl>
1 Sierra Leone         36.8

lifeExp_bycountry %>%
arrange(desc(mean_lifeExp)) %>%

# A tibble: 1 x 2
country mean_lifeExp
<chr>          <dbl>
1 Iceland         76.5


The function group_by() allows us to group by multiple variables. Let’s group by year and continent.

gdp_bycontinents_byyear <- gapminder %>%
group_by(continent, year) %>%
summarize(mean_gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap))

summarise() has grouped output by 'continent'. You can override using the .groups argument.


That is already quite powerful, but it gets even better! You’re not limited to defining 1 new variable in summarize().

gdp_pop_bycontinents_byyear <- gapminder %>%
group_by(continent, year) %>%
summarize(mean_gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap),
sd_gdpPercap = sd(gdpPercap),
mean_pop = mean(pop),
sd_pop = sd(pop))

summarise() has grouped output by 'continent'. You can override using the .groups argument.


## count() and n()

A very common operation is to count the number of observations for each group. The dplyr package comes with two related functions that help with this.

For instance, if we wanted to check the number of countries included in the dataset for the year 2002, we can use the count() function. It takes the name of one or more columns that contain the groups we are interested in, and we can optionally sort the results in descending order by adding sort=TRUE:

gapminder %>%
filter(year == 2002) %>%
count(continent, sort = TRUE)

  continent  n
1    Africa 52
2      Asia 33
3    Europe 30
4  Americas 25
5   Oceania  2


If we need to use the number of observations in calculations, the n() function is useful. It will return the total number of observations in the current group rather than counting the number of observations in each group within a specific column. For instance, if we wanted to get the standard error of the life expectency per continent:

gapminder %>%
group_by(continent) %>%
summarize(se_le = sd(lifeExp)/sqrt(n()))

# A tibble: 5 x 2
continent se_le
* <chr>     <dbl>
1 Africa    0.366
2 Americas  0.540
3 Asia      0.596
4 Europe    0.286
5 Oceania   0.775


You can also chain together several summary operations; in this case calculating the minimum, maximum, mean and se of each continent’s per-country life-expectancy:

gapminder %>%
group_by(continent) %>%
summarize(
mean_le = mean(lifeExp),
min_le = min(lifeExp),
max_le = max(lifeExp),
se_le = sd(lifeExp)/sqrt(n()))

# A tibble: 5 x 5
continent mean_le min_le max_le se_le
* <chr>       <dbl>  <dbl>  <dbl> <dbl>
1 Africa       48.9   23.6   76.4 0.366
2 Americas     64.7   37.6   80.7 0.540
3 Asia         60.1   28.8   82.6 0.596
4 Europe       71.9   43.6   81.8 0.286
5 Oceania      74.3   69.1   81.2 0.775


## Using mutate()

We can also create new variables prior to (or even after) summarizing information using mutate().

gdp_pop_bycontinents_byyear <- gapminder %>%
mutate(gdp_billion = gdpPercap*pop/10^9) %>%
group_by(continent,year) %>%
summarize(mean_gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap),
sd_gdpPercap = sd(gdpPercap),
mean_pop = mean(pop),
sd_pop = sd(pop),
mean_gdp_billion = mean(gdp_billion),
sd_gdp_billion = sd(gdp_billion))

summarise() has grouped output by 'continent'. You can override using the .groups argument.


## Connect mutate with logical filtering: ifelse

When creating new variables, we can hook this with a logical condition. A simple combination of mutate() and ifelse() facilitates filtering right where it is needed: in the moment of creating something new. This easy-to-read statement is a fast and powerful way of discarding certain data (even though the overall dimension of the data frame will not change) or for updating values depending on this given condition.

## keeping all data but "filtering" after a certain condition
# calculate GDP only for people with a life expectation above 25
gdp_pop_bycontinents_byyear_above25 <- gapminder %>%
mutate(gdp_billion = ifelse(lifeExp > 25, gdpPercap * pop / 10^9, NA)) %>%
group_by(continent, year) %>%
summarize(mean_gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap),
sd_gdpPercap = sd(gdpPercap),
mean_pop = mean(pop),
sd_pop = sd(pop),
mean_gdp_billion = mean(gdp_billion),
sd_gdp_billion = sd(gdp_billion))

summarise() has grouped output by 'continent'. You can override using the .groups argument.

## updating only if certain condition is fullfilled
# for life expectations above 40 years, the gpd to be expected in the future is scaled
gdp_future_bycontinents_byyear_high_lifeExp <- gapminder %>%
mutate(gdp_futureExpectation = ifelse(lifeExp > 40, gdpPercap * 1.5, gdpPercap)) %>%
group_by(continent, year) %>%
summarize(mean_gdpPercap = mean(gdpPercap),
mean_gdpPercap_expected = mean(gdp_futureExpectation))

summarise() has grouped output by 'continent'. You can override using the .groups argument.


## Combining dplyr and ggplot2

install.packages('ggplot2')

library("ggplot2")


In the plotting lesson we looked at how to make a multi-panel figure by adding a layer of facet panels using ggplot2. Here is the code we used (with some extra comments):

# Get the start letter of each country
starts.with <- substr(gapminder$country, start = 1, stop = 1) # Filter countries that start with "A" or "Z" az.countries <- gapminder[starts.with %in% c("A", "Z"), ] # Make the plot ggplot(data = az.countries, aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, color = continent)) + geom_line() + facet_wrap( ~ country)  This code makes the right plot but it also creates some variables (starts.with and az.countries) that we might not have any other uses for. Just as we used %>% to pipe data along a chain of dplyr functions we can use it to pass data to ggplot(). Because %>% replaces the first argument in a function we don’t need to specify the data = argument in the ggplot() function. By combining dplyr and ggplot2 functions we can make the same figure without creating any new variables or modifying the data. gapminder %>% # Get the start letter of each country mutate(startsWith = substr(country, start = 1, stop = 1)) %>% # Filter countries that start with "A" or "Z" filter(startsWith %in% c("A", "Z")) %>% # Make the plot ggplot(aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, color = continent)) + geom_line() + facet_wrap( ~ country)  Using dplyr functions also helps us simplify things, for example we could combine the first two steps: gapminder %>% # Filter countries that start with "A" or "Z" filter(substr(country, start = 1, stop = 1) %in% c("A", "Z")) %>% # Make the plot ggplot(aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, color = continent)) + geom_line() + facet_wrap( ~ country)  ## Advanced Challenge Calculate the average life expectancy in 2002 of 2 randomly selected countries for each continent. Then arrange the continent names in reverse order. Hint: Use the dplyr functions arrange() and sample_n(), they have similar syntax to other dplyr functions. ## Solution to Advanced Challenge lifeExp_2countries_bycontinents <- gapminder %>% filter(year==2002) %>% group_by(continent) %>% sample_n(2) %>% summarize(mean_lifeExp=mean(lifeExp)) %>% arrange(desc(mean_lifeExp))  ## Other great resources ## Key Points • Use the dplyr package to manipulate data frames. • Use select() to choose variables from a data frame. • Use filter() to choose data based on values. • Use group_by() and summarize() to work with subsets of data. • Use mutate() to create new variables. # Data frame Manipulation with tidyr ## Overview Teaching: 30 min Exercises: 15 min Questions • How can I change the layout of a data frame? Objectives • To understand the concepts of ‘longer’ and ‘wider’ data frame formats and be able to convert between them with tidyr. Researchers often want to reshape their data frames from ‘wide’ to ‘longer’ layouts, or vice-versa. The ‘long’ layout or format is where: • each column is a variable • each row is an observation In the purely ‘long’ (or ‘longest’) format, you usually have 1 column for the observed variable and the other columns are ID variables. For the ‘wide’ format each row is often a site/subject/patient and you have multiple observation variables containing the same type of data. These can be either repeated observations over time, or observation of multiple variables (or a mix of both). You may find data input may be simpler or some other applications may prefer the ‘wide’ format. However, many of R’s functions have been designed assuming you have ‘longer’ formatted data. This tutorial will help you efficiently transform your data shape regardless of original format. Long and wide data frame layouts mainly affect readability. For humans, the wide format is often more intuitive since we can often see more of the data on the screen due to its shape. However, the long format is more machine readable and is closer to the formatting of databases. The ID variables in our data frames are similar to the fields in a database and observed variables are like the database values. ## Getting started First install the packages if you haven’t already done so (you probably installed dplyr in the previous lesson): #install.packages("tidyr") #install.packages("dplyr")  Load the packages library("tidyr") library("dplyr")  First, lets look at the structure of our original gapminder data frame: str(gapminder)  'data.frame': 1704 obs. of 6 variables:$ country  : chr  "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" "Afghanistan" ...
$year : int 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 ...$ pop      : num  8425333 9240934 10267083 11537966 13079460 ...
$continent: chr "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" "Asia" ...$ lifeExp  : num  28.8 30.3 32 34 36.1 ...
$gdpPercap: num 779 821 853 836 740 ...  ## Challenge 1 Is gapminder a purely long, purely wide, or some intermediate format? ## Solution to Challenge 1 The original gapminder data.frame is in an intermediate format. It is not purely long since it had multiple observation variables (pop,lifeExp,gdpPercap). Sometimes, as with the gapminder dataset, we have multiple types of observed data. It is somewhere in between the purely ‘long’ and ‘wide’ data formats. We have 3 “ID variables” (continent, country, year) and 3 “Observation variables” (pop,lifeExp,gdpPercap). This intermediate format can be preferred despite not having ALL observations in 1 column given that all 3 observation variables have different units. There are few operations that would need us to make this data frame any longer (i.e. 4 ID variables and 1 Observation variable). While using many of the functions in R, which are often vector based, you usually do not want to do mathematical operations on values with different units. For example, using the purely long format, a single mean for all of the values of population, life expectancy, and GDP would not be meaningful since it would return the mean of values with 3 incompatible units. The solution is that we first manipulate the data either by grouping (see the lesson on dplyr), or we change the structure of the data frame. Note: Some plotting functions in R actually work better in the wide format data. ## From wide to long format with pivot_longer() Until now, we’ve been using the nicely formatted original gapminder dataset, but ‘real’ data (i.e. our own research data) will never be so well organized. Here let’s start with the wide formatted version of the gapminder dataset. Download the wide version of the gapminder data from here and save it in your data folder. We’ll load the data file and look at it. Note: we don’t want our continent and country columns to be factors, so we use the stringsAsFactors argument for read.csv() to disable that. gap_wide <- read.csv("data/gapminder_wide.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE) str(gap_wide)  'data.frame': 142 obs. of 38 variables:$ continent     : chr  "Africa" "Africa" "Africa" "Africa" ...
$country : chr "Algeria" "Angola" "Benin" "Botswana" ...$ gdpPercap_1952: num  2449 3521 1063 851 543 ...
$gdpPercap_1957: num 3014 3828 960 918 617 ...$ gdpPercap_1962: num  2551 4269 949 984 723 ...
$gdpPercap_1967: num 3247 5523 1036 1215 795 ...$ gdpPercap_1972: num  4183 5473 1086 2264 855 ...
$gdpPercap_1977: num 4910 3009 1029 3215 743 ...$ gdpPercap_1982: num  5745 2757 1278 4551 807 ...
$gdpPercap_1987: num 5681 2430 1226 6206 912 ...$ gdpPercap_1992: num  5023 2628 1191 7954 932 ...
$gdpPercap_1997: num 4797 2277 1233 8647 946 ...$ gdpPercap_2002: num  5288 2773 1373 11004 1038 ...
$gdpPercap_2007: num 6223 4797 1441 12570 1217 ...$ lifeExp_1952  : num  43.1 30 38.2 47.6 32 ...
$lifeExp_1957 : num 45.7 32 40.4 49.6 34.9 ...$ lifeExp_1962  : num  48.3 34 42.6 51.5 37.8 ...
$lifeExp_1967 : num 51.4 36 44.9 53.3 40.7 ...$ lifeExp_1972  : num  54.5 37.9 47 56 43.6 ...
$lifeExp_1977 : num 58 39.5 49.2 59.3 46.1 ...$ lifeExp_1982  : num  61.4 39.9 50.9 61.5 48.1 ...
$lifeExp_1987 : num 65.8 39.9 52.3 63.6 49.6 ...$ lifeExp_1992  : num  67.7 40.6 53.9 62.7 50.3 ...
$lifeExp_1997 : num 69.2 41 54.8 52.6 50.3 ...$ lifeExp_2002  : num  71 41 54.4 46.6 50.6 ...
$lifeExp_2007 : num 72.3 42.7 56.7 50.7 52.3 ...$ pop_1952      : num  9279525 4232095 1738315 442308 4469979 ...
$pop_1957 : num 10270856 4561361 1925173 474639 4713416 ...$ pop_1962      : num  11000948 4826015 2151895 512764 4919632 ...
$pop_1967 : num 12760499 5247469 2427334 553541 5127935 ...$ pop_1972      : num  14760787 5894858 2761407 619351 5433886 ...
$pop_1977 : num 17152804 6162675 3168267 781472 5889574 ...$ pop_1982      : num  20033753 7016384 3641603 970347 6634596 ...
$pop_1987 : num 23254956 7874230 4243788 1151184 7586551 ...$ pop_1992      : num  26298373 8735988 4981671 1342614 8878303 ...
$pop_1997 : num 29072015 9875024 6066080 1536536 10352843 ...$ pop_2002      : int  31287142 10866106 7026113 1630347 12251209 7021078 15929988 4048013 8835739 614382 ...
$pop_2007 : int 33333216 12420476 8078314 1639131 14326203 8390505 17696293 4369038 10238807 710960 ...  To change this very wide data frame layout back to our nice, intermediate (or longer) layout, we will use one of the two available pivot functions from the tidyr package. To convert from wide to a longer format, we will use the pivot_longer() function. pivot_longer() makes datasets longer by increasing the number of rows and decreasing the number of columns, or ‘lengthening’ your observation variables into a single variable. gap_long <- gap_wide %>% pivot_longer( cols = c(starts_with('pop'), starts_with('lifeExp'), starts_with('gdpPercap')), names_to = "obstype_year", values_to = "obs_values" ) str(gap_long)  tibble [5,112 × 4] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)$ continent   : chr [1:5112] "Africa" "Africa" "Africa" "Africa" ...
$country : chr [1:5112] "Algeria" "Algeria" "Algeria" "Algeria" ...$ obstype_year: chr [1:5112] "pop_1952" "pop_1957" "pop_1962" "pop_1967" ...
$obs_values : num [1:5112] 9279525 10270856 11000948 12760499 14760787 ...  Here we have used piping syntax which is similar to what we were doing in the previous lesson with dplyr. In fact, these are compatible and you can use a mix of tidyr and dplyr functions by piping them together. We first provide to pivot_longer() a vector of column names that will be pivoted into longer format. We could type out all the observation variables, but as in the select() function (see dplyr lesson), we can use the starts_with() argument to select all variables that start with the desired character string. pivot_longer() also allows the alternative syntax of using the - symbol to identify which variables are not to be pivoted (i.e. ID variables). The next arguments to pivot_longer() are names_to for naming the column that will contain the new ID variable (obstype_year) and values_to for naming the new amalgamated observation variable (obs_value). We supply these new column names as strings. gap_long <- gap_wide %>% pivot_longer( cols = c(-continent, -country), names_to = "obstype_year", values_to = "obs_values" ) str(gap_long)  tibble [5,112 × 4] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)$ continent   : chr [1:5112] "Africa" "Africa" "Africa" "Africa" ...
$country : chr [1:5112] "Algeria" "Algeria" "Algeria" "Algeria" ...$ obstype_year: chr [1:5112] "gdpPercap_1952" "gdpPercap_1957" "gdpPercap_1962" "gdpPercap_1967" ...
$obs_values : num [1:5112] 2449 3014 2551 3247 4183 ...  That may seem trivial with this particular data frame, but sometimes you have 1 ID variable and 40 observation variables with irregular variable names. The flexibility is a huge time saver! Now obstype_year actually contains 2 pieces of information, the observation type (pop,lifeExp, or gdpPercap) and the year. We can use the separate() function to split the character strings into multiple variables gap_long <- gap_long %>% separate(obstype_year, into = c('obs_type', 'year'), sep = "_") gap_long$year <- as.integer(gap_long$year)  ## Challenge 2 Using gap_long, calculate the mean life expectancy, population, and gdpPercap for each continent. Hint: use the group_by() and summarize() functions we learned in the dplyr lesson ## Solution to Challenge 2 gap_long %>% group_by(continent, obs_type) %>% summarize(means=mean(obs_values))  summarise() has grouped output by 'continent'. You can override using the .groups argument.  # A tibble: 15 x 3 # Groups: continent [5] continent obs_type means <chr> <chr> <dbl> 1 Africa gdpPercap 2194. 2 Africa lifeExp 48.9 3 Africa pop 9916003. 4 Americas gdpPercap 7136. 5 Americas lifeExp 64.7 6 Americas pop 24504795. 7 Asia gdpPercap 7902. 8 Asia lifeExp 60.1 9 Asia pop 77038722. 10 Europe gdpPercap 14469. 11 Europe lifeExp 71.9 12 Europe pop 17169765. 13 Oceania gdpPercap 18622. 14 Oceania lifeExp 74.3 15 Oceania pop 8874672.  ## From long to intermediate format with pivot_wider() It is always good to check work. So, let’s use the second pivot function, pivot_wider(), to ‘widen’ our observation variables back out. pivot_wider() is the opposite of pivot_longer(), making a dataset wider by increasing the number of columns and decreasing the number of rows. We can use pivot_wider() to pivot or reshape our gap_long to the original intermediate format or the widest format. Let’s start with the intermediate format. The pivot_wider() function takes names_from and values_from arguments. To names_from we supply the column name whose contents will be pivoted into new output columns in the widened data frame. The corresponding values will be added from the column named in the values_from argument. gap_normal <- gap_long %>% pivot_wider(names_from = obs_type, values_from = obs_values) dim(gap_normal)  [1] 1704 6  dim(gapminder)  [1] 1704 6  names(gap_normal)  [1] "continent" "country" "year" "gdpPercap" "lifeExp" "pop"  names(gapminder)  [1] "country" "year" "pop" "continent" "lifeExp" "gdpPercap"  Now we’ve got an intermediate data frame gap_normal with the same dimensions as the original gapminder, but the order of the variables is different. Let’s fix that before checking if they are all.equal(). gap_normal <- gap_normal[, names(gapminder)] all.equal(gap_normal, gapminder)  [1] "Attributes: < Component \"class\": Lengths (3, 1) differ (string compare on first 1) >" [2] "Attributes: < Component \"class\": 1 string mismatch >" [3] "Component \"country\": 1704 string mismatches" [4] "Component \"pop\": Mean relative difference: 1.634504" [5] "Component \"continent\": 1212 string mismatches" [6] "Component \"lifeExp\": Mean relative difference: 0.203822" [7] "Component \"gdpPercap\": Mean relative difference: 1.162302"  head(gap_normal)  # A tibble: 6 x 6 country year pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap <chr> <int> <dbl> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> 1 Algeria 1952 9279525 Africa 43.1 2449. 2 Algeria 1957 10270856 Africa 45.7 3014. 3 Algeria 1962 11000948 Africa 48.3 2551. 4 Algeria 1967 12760499 Africa 51.4 3247. 5 Algeria 1972 14760787 Africa 54.5 4183. 6 Algeria 1977 17152804 Africa 58.0 4910.  head(gapminder)   country year pop continent lifeExp gdpPercap 1 Afghanistan 1952 8425333 Asia 28.801 779.4453 2 Afghanistan 1957 9240934 Asia 30.332 820.8530 3 Afghanistan 1962 10267083 Asia 31.997 853.1007 4 Afghanistan 1967 11537966 Asia 34.020 836.1971 5 Afghanistan 1972 13079460 Asia 36.088 739.9811 6 Afghanistan 1977 14880372 Asia 38.438 786.1134  We’re almost there, the original was sorted by country, then year. gap_normal <- gap_normal %>% arrange(country, year) all.equal(gap_normal, gapminder)  [1] "Attributes: < Component \"class\": Lengths (3, 1) differ (string compare on first 1) >" [2] "Attributes: < Component \"class\": 1 string mismatch >"  That’s great! We’ve gone from the longest format back to the intermediate and we didn’t introduce any errors in our code. Now let’s convert the long all the way back to the wide. In the wide format, we will keep country and continent as ID variables and pivot the observations across the 3 metrics (pop,lifeExp,gdpPercap) and time (year). First we need to create appropriate labels for all our new variables (time*metric combinations) and we also need to unify our ID variables to simplify the process of defining gap_wide. gap_temp <- gap_long %>% unite(var_ID, continent, country, sep = "_") str(gap_temp)  tibble [5,112 × 4] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)$ var_ID    : chr [1:5112] "Africa_Algeria" "Africa_Algeria" "Africa_Algeria" "Africa_Algeria" ...
$obs_type : chr [1:5112] "gdpPercap" "gdpPercap" "gdpPercap" "gdpPercap" ...$ year      : int [1:5112] 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 ...
$obs_values: num [1:5112] 2449 3014 2551 3247 4183 ...  gap_temp <- gap_long %>% unite(ID_var, continent, country, sep = "_") %>% unite(var_names, obs_type, year, sep = "_") str(gap_temp)  tibble [5,112 × 3] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)$ ID_var    : chr [1:5112] "Africa_Algeria" "Africa_Algeria" "Africa_Algeria" "Africa_Algeria" ...
$var_names : chr [1:5112] "gdpPercap_1952" "gdpPercap_1957" "gdpPercap_1962" "gdpPercap_1967" ...$ obs_values: num [1:5112] 2449 3014 2551 3247 4183 ...


Using unite() we now have a single ID variable which is a combination of continent,country,and we have defined variable names. We’re now ready to pipe in pivot_wider()

gap_wide_new <- gap_long %>%
unite(ID_var, continent, country, sep = "_") %>%
unite(var_names, obs_type, year, sep = "_") %>%
pivot_wider(names_from = var_names, values_from = obs_values)
str(gap_wide_new)

tibble [142 × 37] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)
$ID_var : chr [1:142] "Africa_Algeria" "Africa_Angola" "Africa_Benin" "Africa_Botswana" ...$ gdpPercap_1952: num [1:142] 2449 3521 1063 851 543 ...
$gdpPercap_1957: num [1:142] 3014 3828 960 918 617 ...$ gdpPercap_1962: num [1:142] 2551 4269 949 984 723 ...
$gdpPercap_1967: num [1:142] 3247 5523 1036 1215 795 ...$ gdpPercap_1972: num [1:142] 4183 5473 1086 2264 855 ...
$gdpPercap_1977: num [1:142] 4910 3009 1029 3215 743 ...$ gdpPercap_1982: num [1:142] 5745 2757 1278 4551 807 ...
$gdpPercap_1987: num [1:142] 5681 2430 1226 6206 912 ...$ gdpPercap_1992: num [1:142] 5023 2628 1191 7954 932 ...
$gdpPercap_1997: num [1:142] 4797 2277 1233 8647 946 ...$ gdpPercap_2002: num [1:142] 5288 2773 1373 11004 1038 ...
$gdpPercap_2007: num [1:142] 6223 4797 1441 12570 1217 ...$ lifeExp_1952  : num [1:142] 43.1 30 38.2 47.6 32 ...
$lifeExp_1957 : num [1:142] 45.7 32 40.4 49.6 34.9 ...$ lifeExp_1962  : num [1:142] 48.3 34 42.6 51.5 37.8 ...
$lifeExp_1967 : num [1:142] 51.4 36 44.9 53.3 40.7 ...$ lifeExp_1972  : num [1:142] 54.5 37.9 47 56 43.6 ...
$lifeExp_1977 : num [1:142] 58 39.5 49.2 59.3 46.1 ...$ lifeExp_1982  : num [1:142] 61.4 39.9 50.9 61.5 48.1 ...
$lifeExp_1987 : num [1:142] 65.8 39.9 52.3 63.6 49.6 ...$ lifeExp_1992  : num [1:142] 67.7 40.6 53.9 62.7 50.3 ...
$lifeExp_1997 : num [1:142] 69.2 41 54.8 52.6 50.3 ...$ lifeExp_2002  : num [1:142] 71 41 54.4 46.6 50.6 ...
$lifeExp_2007 : num [1:142] 72.3 42.7 56.7 50.7 52.3 ...$ pop_1952      : num [1:142] 9279525 4232095 1738315 442308 4469979 ...
$pop_1957 : num [1:142] 10270856 4561361 1925173 474639 4713416 ...$ pop_1962      : num [1:142] 11000948 4826015 2151895 512764 4919632 ...
$pop_1967 : num [1:142] 12760499 5247469 2427334 553541 5127935 ...$ pop_1972      : num [1:142] 14760787 5894858 2761407 619351 5433886 ...
$pop_1977 : num [1:142] 17152804 6162675 3168267 781472 5889574 ...$ pop_1982      : num [1:142] 20033753 7016384 3641603 970347 6634596 ...
$pop_1987 : num [1:142] 23254956 7874230 4243788 1151184 7586551 ...$ pop_1992      : num [1:142] 26298373 8735988 4981671 1342614 8878303 ...
$pop_1997 : num [1:142] 29072015 9875024 6066080 1536536 10352843 ...$ pop_2002      : num [1:142] 31287142 10866106 7026113 1630347 12251209 ...
$pop_2007 : num [1:142] 33333216 12420476 8078314 1639131 14326203 ...  ## Challenge 3 Take this 1 step further and create a gap_ludicrously_wide format data by pivoting over countries, year and the 3 metrics? Hint this new data frame should only have 5 rows. ## Solution to Challenge 3 gap_ludicrously_wide <- gap_long %>% unite(var_names, obs_type, year, country, sep = "_") %>% pivot_wider(names_from = var_names, values_from = obs_values)  Now we have a great ‘wide’ format data frame, but the ID_var could be more usable, let’s separate it into 2 variables with separate() gap_wide_betterID <- separate(gap_wide_new, ID_var, c("continent", "country"), sep="_") gap_wide_betterID <- gap_long %>% unite(ID_var, continent, country, sep = "_") %>% unite(var_names, obs_type, year, sep = "_") %>% pivot_wider(names_from = var_names, values_from = obs_values) %>% separate(ID_var, c("continent","country"), sep = "_") str(gap_wide_betterID)  tibble [142 × 38] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)$ continent     : chr [1:142] "Africa" "Africa" "Africa" "Africa" ...
$country : chr [1:142] "Algeria" "Angola" "Benin" "Botswana" ...$ gdpPercap_1952: num [1:142] 2449 3521 1063 851 543 ...
$gdpPercap_1957: num [1:142] 3014 3828 960 918 617 ...$ gdpPercap_1962: num [1:142] 2551 4269 949 984 723 ...
$gdpPercap_1967: num [1:142] 3247 5523 1036 1215 795 ...$ gdpPercap_1972: num [1:142] 4183 5473 1086 2264 855 ...
$gdpPercap_1977: num [1:142] 4910 3009 1029 3215 743 ...$ gdpPercap_1982: num [1:142] 5745 2757 1278 4551 807 ...
$gdpPercap_1987: num [1:142] 5681 2430 1226 6206 912 ...$ gdpPercap_1992: num [1:142] 5023 2628 1191 7954 932 ...
$gdpPercap_1997: num [1:142] 4797 2277 1233 8647 946 ...$ gdpPercap_2002: num [1:142] 5288 2773 1373 11004 1038 ...
$gdpPercap_2007: num [1:142] 6223 4797 1441 12570 1217 ...$ lifeExp_1952  : num [1:142] 43.1 30 38.2 47.6 32 ...
$lifeExp_1957 : num [1:142] 45.7 32 40.4 49.6 34.9 ...$ lifeExp_1962  : num [1:142] 48.3 34 42.6 51.5 37.8 ...
$lifeExp_1967 : num [1:142] 51.4 36 44.9 53.3 40.7 ...$ lifeExp_1972  : num [1:142] 54.5 37.9 47 56 43.6 ...
$lifeExp_1977 : num [1:142] 58 39.5 49.2 59.3 46.1 ...$ lifeExp_1982  : num [1:142] 61.4 39.9 50.9 61.5 48.1 ...
$lifeExp_1987 : num [1:142] 65.8 39.9 52.3 63.6 49.6 ...$ lifeExp_1992  : num [1:142] 67.7 40.6 53.9 62.7 50.3 ...
$lifeExp_1997 : num [1:142] 69.2 41 54.8 52.6 50.3 ...$ lifeExp_2002  : num [1:142] 71 41 54.4 46.6 50.6 ...
$lifeExp_2007 : num [1:142] 72.3 42.7 56.7 50.7 52.3 ...$ pop_1952      : num [1:142] 9279525 4232095 1738315 442308 4469979 ...
$pop_1957 : num [1:142] 10270856 4561361 1925173 474639 4713416 ...$ pop_1962      : num [1:142] 11000948 4826015 2151895 512764 4919632 ...
$pop_1967 : num [1:142] 12760499 5247469 2427334 553541 5127935 ...$ pop_1972      : num [1:142] 14760787 5894858 2761407 619351 5433886 ...
$pop_1977 : num [1:142] 17152804 6162675 3168267 781472 5889574 ...$ pop_1982      : num [1:142] 20033753 7016384 3641603 970347 6634596 ...
$pop_1987 : num [1:142] 23254956 7874230 4243788 1151184 7586551 ...$ pop_1992      : num [1:142] 26298373 8735988 4981671 1342614 8878303 ...
$pop_1997 : num [1:142] 29072015 9875024 6066080 1536536 10352843 ...$ pop_2002      : num [1:142] 31287142 10866106 7026113 1630347 12251209 ...
$pop_2007 : num [1:142] 33333216 12420476 8078314 1639131 14326203 ...  all.equal(gap_wide, gap_wide_betterID)  [1] "Attributes: < Component \"class\": Lengths (1, 3) differ (string compare on first 1) >" [2] "Attributes: < Component \"class\": 1 string mismatch >"  There and back again! ## Other great resources ## Key Points • Use the tidyr package to change the layout of data frames. • Use pivot_longer() to go from wide to longer layout. • Use pivot_wider() to go from long to wider layout. # Producing Reports With knitr ## Overview Teaching: 60 min Exercises: 15 min Questions • How can I integrate software and reports? Objectives • Understand the value of writing reproducible reports • Learn how to recognise and compile the basic components of an R Markdown file • Become familiar with R code chunks, and understand their purpose, structure and options • Demonstrate the use of inline chunks for weaving R outputs into text blocks, for example when discussing the results of some calculations • Be aware of alternative output formats to which an R Markdown file can be exported ## Data analysis reports Data analysts tend to write a lot of reports, describing their analyses and results, for their collaborators or to document their work for future reference. Many new users begin by first writing a single R script containing all of the work. Then simply share the analysis by emailing the script and various graphs as attachments. But this can be cumbersome, requiring a lengthy discussion to explain which attachment was which result. Writing formal reports with Word or LaTeX can simplify this by incorporating both the analysis report and output graphs into a single document. But tweaking formatting to make figures look correct and fix obnoxious page breaks can be tedious and lead to a lengthly “whack a mole” game of fixing new mistakes resulting from a single formatting change. Creating a web page (as an html file) by using R Markdown makes things easier. The report can be one long stream, so tall figures that wouldn’t ordinary fit on one page can be kept full size and easier to read, since the reader can simply keep scrolling. Formatting is simple and easy to modify, allowing you to spend more time on your analyses instead of writing reports. ## Literate programming Ideally, such analysis reports are reproducible documents: If an error is discovered, or if some additional subjects are added to the data, you can just re-compile the report and get the new or corrected results (versus having to reconstruct figures, paste them into a Word document, and further hand-edit various detailed results). The key R package is knitr. It allows you to create a document that is a mixture of text and chunks of code. When the document is processed by knitr, chunks of code will be executed, and graphs or other results inserted into the final document. This sort of idea has been called “literate programming”. knitr allows you to mix basically any sort of text with code from different programming languages, but we recommend that you use R Markdown, which mixes Markdown with R. Markdown is a light-weight mark-up language for creating web pages. ## Creating an R Markdown file Within RStudio, click File → New File → R Markdown and you’ll get a dialog box like this: You can stick with the default (HTML output), but give it a title. ## Basic components of R Markdown The initial chunk of text (header) contains instructions for R to specify what kind of document will be created, and the options chosen. You can use the header to give your document a title, author, date, and tell it that you’re going to want to produce html output (in other words, a web page). --- title: "Initial R Markdown document" author: "Karl Broman" date: "April 23, 2015" output: html_document ---  You can delete any of those fields if you don’t want them included. The double-quotes aren’t strictly necessary in this case. They’re mostly needed if you want to include a colon in the title. RStudio creates the document with some example text to get you started. Note below that there are chunks like {r} summary(cars)   These are chunks of R code that will be executed by knitr and replaced by their results. More on this later. Also note the web address that’s put between angle brackets (< >) as well as the double-asterisks in **Knit**. This is Markdown. ## Markdown Markdown is a system for writing web pages by marking up the text much as you would in an email rather than writing html code. The marked-up text gets converted to html, replacing the marks with the proper html code. For now, let’s delete all of the stuff that’s there and write a bit of markdown. You make things bold using two asterisks, like this: **bold**, and you make things italics by using underscores, like this: _italics_. You can make a bulleted list by writing a list with hyphens or asterisks, like this: * bold with double-asterisks * italics with underscores * code-type font with backticks  or like this: - bold with double-asterisks - italics with underscores - code-type font with backticks  Each will appear as: • bold with double-asterisks • italics with underscores • code-type font with backticks You can use whatever method you prefer, but be consistent. This maintains the readability of your code. You can make a numbered list by just using numbers. You can even use the same number over and over if you want: 1. bold with double-asterisks 1. italics with underscores 1. code-type font with backticks  This will appear as: 1. bold with double-asterisks 2. italics with underscores 3. code-type font with backticks You can make section headers of different sizes by initiating a line with some number of # symbols: # Title ## Main section ### Sub-section #### Sub-sub section  You compile the R Markdown document to an html webpage by clicking the “Knit” button in the upper-left. ## Challenge 1 Create a new R Markdown document. Delete all of the R code chunks and write a bit of Markdown (some sections, some italicized text, and an itemized list). Convert the document to a webpage. ## Solution to Challenge 1 In RStudio, select File > New file > R Markdown… Delete the placeholder text and add the following: # Introduction ## Background on Data This report uses the *gapminder* dataset, which has columns that include: * country * continent * year * lifeExp * pop * gdpPercap ## Background on Methods  Then click the ‘Knit’ button on the toolbar to generate an html document (webpage). ## A bit more Markdown You can make a hyperlink like this: [text to show](http://the-web-page.com). You can include an image file like this: ![caption](http://url/for/file) You can do subscripts (e.g., F~2~) with F~2~ and superscripts (e.g., F^2^) with F^2^. If you know how to write equations in LaTeX, you can use $ $ and  to insert math equations, like $E = mc^2$ and $$y = \mu + \sum_{i=1}^p \beta_i x_i + \epsilon$$  You can review Markdown syntax by navigating to the “Markdown Quick Reference” under the “Help” field in the toolbar at the top of RStudio. ## R code chunks The real power of Markdown comes from mixing markdown with chunks of code. This is R Markdown. When processed, the R code will be executed; if they produce figures, the figures will be inserted in the final document. The main code chunks look like this: {r load_data} gapminder <- read.csv("gapminder.csv")   That is, you place a chunk of R code between {r chunk_name} and . You should give each chunk a unique name, as they will help you to fix errors and, if any graphs are produced, the file names are based on the name of the code chunk that produced them. ## Challenge 2 Add code chunks to: • Load the ggplot2 package • Read the gapminder data • Create a plot ## Solution to Challenge 2 {r load-ggplot2} library("ggplot2")   {r read-gapminder-data} gapminder <- read.csv("gapminder.csv")   {r make-plot} plot(lifeExp ~ year, data = gapminder)   ## How things get compiled When you press the “Knit” button, the R Markdown document is processed by knitr and a plain Markdown document is produced (as well as, potentially, a set of figure files): the R code is executed and replaced by both the input and the output; if figures are produced, links to those figures are included. The Markdown and figure documents are then processed by the tool pandoc, which converts the Markdown file into an html file, with the figures embedded. ## Chunk options There are a variety of options to affect how the code chunks are treated. Here are some examples: • Use echo=FALSE to avoid having the code itself shown. • Use results="hide" to avoid having any results printed. • Use eval=FALSE to have the code shown but not evaluated. • Use warning=FALSE and message=FALSE to hide any warnings or messages produced. • Use fig.height and fig.width to control the size of the figures produced (in inches). So you might write: {r load_libraries, echo=FALSE, message=FALSE} library("dplyr") library("ggplot2")   Often there will be particular options that you’ll want to use repeatedly; for this, you can set global chunk options, like so: {r global_options, echo=FALSE} knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.path="Figs/", message=FALSE, warning=FALSE,
echo=FALSE, results="hide", fig.width=11)



The fig.path option defines where the figures will be saved. The / here is really important; without it, the figures would be saved in the standard place but just with names that begin with Figs.

If you have multiple R Markdown files in a common directory, you might want to use fig.path to define separate prefixes for the figure file names, like fig.path="Figs/cleaning-" and fig.path="Figs/analysis-".

## Challenge 3

Use chunk options to control the size of a figure and to hide the code.

## Solution to Challenge 3

{r echo = FALSE, fig.width = 3}
plot(faithful)



You can review all of the R chunk options by navigating to the “R Markdown Cheat Sheet” under the “Cheatsheets” section of the “Help” field in the toolbar at the top of RStudio.

## Inline R code

You can make every number in your report reproducible. Use r and  for an in-line code chunk, like so: r round(some_value, 2). The code will be executed and replaced with the value of the result.

Don’t let these in-line chunks get split across lines.

Perhaps precede the paragraph with a larger code chunk that does calculations and defines variables, with include=FALSE for that larger chunk (which is the same as echo=FALSE and results="hide").

Rounding can produce differences in output in such situations. You may want 2.0, but round(2.03, 1) will give just 2.

The myround function in the R/broman package handles this.

## Challenge 4

Try out a bit of in-line R code.

## Solution to Challenge 4

Here’s some inline code to determine that 2 + 2 = r 2+2.

## Other output options

You can also convert R Markdown to a PDF or a Word document. Click the little triangle next to the “Knit” button to get a drop-down menu. Or you could put pdf_document or word_document in the initial header of the file.

## Tip: Creating PDF documents

Creating .pdf documents may require installation of some extra software. If required this is detailed in an error message.

## Key Points

• Mix reporting written in R Markdown with software written in R.

• Specify chunk options to control formatting.

• Use knitr to convert these documents into PDF and other formats.

# Writing Good Software

## Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 0 min
Questions
• How can I write software that other people can use?

Objectives
• Describe best practices for writing R and explain the justification for each.

Keep your project folder structured, organized and tidy, by creating subfolders for your code files, manuals, data, binaries, output plots, etc. It can be done completely manually, or with the help of RStudio’s New Project functionality, or a designated package, such as ProjectTemplate.

## Tip: ProjectTemplate - a possible solution

One way to automate the management of projects is to install the third-party package, ProjectTemplate. This package will set up an ideal directory structure for project management. This is very useful as it enables you to have your analysis pipeline/workflow organised and structured. Together with the default RStudio project functionality and Git you will be able to keep track of your work as well as be able to share your work with collaborators.

1. Install ProjectTemplate.
3. Initialise the project:
install.packages("ProjectTemplate")
library("ProjectTemplate")
create.project("../my_project_2", merge.strategy = "allow.non.conflict")


The most important part of writing code is making it readable and understandable. You want someone else to be able to pick up your code and be able to understand what it does: more often than not this someone will be you 6 months down the line, who will otherwise be cursing past-self.

## Documentation: tell us what and why, not how

When you first start out, your comments will often describe what a command does, since you’re still learning yourself and it can help to clarify concepts and remind you later. However, these comments aren’t particularly useful later on when you don’t remember what problem your code is trying to solve. Try to also include comments that tell you why you’re solving a problem, and what problem that is. The how can come after that: it’s an implementation detail you ideally shouldn’t have to worry about.

Our recommendation is that you should separate your functions from your analysis scripts, and store them in a separate file that you source when you open the R session in your project. This approach is nice because it leaves you with an uncluttered analysis script, and a repository of useful functions that can be loaded into any analysis script in your project. It also lets you group related functions together easily.

## Break down problem into bite size pieces

When you first start out, problem solving and function writing can be daunting tasks, and hard to separate from code inexperience. Try to break down your problem into digestible chunks and worry about the implementation details later: keep breaking down the problem into smaller and smaller functions until you reach a point where you can code a solution, and build back up from there.

## Know that your code is doing the right thing

Make sure to test your functions!

## Don’t repeat yourself

Functions enable easy reuse within a project. If you see blocks of similar lines of code through your project, those are usually candidates for being moved into functions.

If your calculations are performed through a series of functions, then the project becomes more modular and easier to change. This is especially the case for which a particular input always gives a particular output.

## Remember to be stylish

Apply consistent style to your code.

## Key Points

• Keep your project folder structured, organized and tidy.

• Document what and why, not how.

• Break programs into short single-purpose functions.

• Write re-runnable tests.

• Don’t repeat yourself.

• Be consistent in naming, indentation, and other aspects of style.