9.1 Exploration Setup

20200317 Packages used in this chapter include dplyr (Wickham et al. 2023), magrittr (Bache and Wickham 2022), and rattle (G. Williams 2022).

Packages are loaded into the currently running R session from your local library directories on disk. Missing packages can be installed using utils::install.packages() within R. On Ubuntu, for example, R packages can also be installed using $ wajig install r-cran-<pkgname>.

# Load required packages from local library into the R session.

library(dplyr)        # Wrangling: select() sample_frac().
library(magrittr)     # Data pipelines: %>% %<>% %T>% equals().
library(rattle)       # normVarNames(). Dataset: weather.

The rattle::weatherAUS dataset is loaded into the template variable ds and further template variables are setup as introduced by Graham J. Williams (2017). See Chapter 8 for details.

dsname <- "weatherAUS"
ds     <- get(dsname)
    
nobs   <- nrow(ds)

vnames <- names(ds)
ds    %<>% clean_names(numerals="right")
names(vnames) <- names(ds)

vars   <- names(ds)
target <- "rain_tomorrow"
vars   <- c(target, vars) %>% unique() %>% rev()

A random sample of the dataset:

ds %>% sample_frac()
## # A tibble: 208,495 × 24
##    date       location     min_temp max_temp rainfall evaporation sunshine
##    <date>     <chr>           <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>       <dbl>    <dbl>
##  1 2014-08-31 PearceRAAF       10.7     18       42.2        NA        4.2
##  2 2017-07-28 Katherine        14.6     32.1      0           6.2     NA  
##  3 2013-09-29 Penrith          10.1     26.8      0          NA       NA  
##  4 2010-09-24 Nuriootpa         2.1     17.5      0           1.4     10.7
##  5 2010-05-23 CoffsHarbour     14.6     20.7      0.2         3.6      3.4
##  6 2013-07-08 Wollongong       10.6     17.3      0          NA       NA  
##  7 2017-11-19 Katherine        NA       NA       NA          NA       NA  
##  8 2014-11-21 Moree            25.8     40.5     NA          NA       NA  
##  9 2021-06-26 AliceSprings      1.1     14.9      0          NA       NA  
## 10 2019-08-14 MountGinini      -2.7      3.8      0          NA       NA  
## # ℹ 208,485 more rows
....

References

Bache, Stefan Milton, and Hadley Wickham. 2022. Magrittr: A Forward-Pipe Operator for r. https://magrittr.tidyverse.org.
Wickham, Hadley, Romain François, Lionel Henry, Kirill Müller, and Davis Vaughan. 2023. Dplyr: A Grammar of Data Manipulation. https://dplyr.tidyverse.org.
Williams, Graham. 2022. Rattle: Graphical User Interface for Data Science in r. https://rattle.togaware.com/.
Williams, Graham J. 2017. The Essentials of Data Science: Knowledge Discovery Using r. The r Series. CRC Press.


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