9.1 Exploration Setup

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

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: 226,868 × 24
##    date       location    min_temp max_temp rainfall evaporation sunshine
##    <date>     <chr>          <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>       <dbl>    <dbl>
##  1 2014-02-10 Walpole         10.7     22.9      0          NA       NA  
##  2 2021-08-28 Uluru            9.7     27.1      0          NA       NA  
##  3 2019-05-14 NorahHead       14.2     24.3      0          NA       NA  
##  4 2010-10-24 Cobar           14.1     23.9      4.8         5.4     NA  
##  5 2022-09-23 Richmond        14.3     20        1.8        NA       NA  
##  6 2012-06-08 Adelaide         3.3     14.1      0           1.6     NA  
##  7 2020-05-31 Richmond         7.2     21.7      0           2.6     NA  
##  8 2020-12-24 Mildura         13.7     29.7      0           8.6     13.3
##  9 2023-02-09 Hobart          13.2     23.4      0          NA       NA  
## 10 2020-01-16 Witchcliffe     12.9     30.2      0          NA       NA  
## # ℹ 226,858 more rows
....

References

Bache, Stefan Milton, and Hadley Wickham. 2022. Magrittr: A Forward-Pipe Operator for r. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=magrittr.

Wickham, Hadley, Romain François, Lionel Henry, Kirill Müller, and Davis Vaughan. 2023. Dplyr: A Grammar of Data Manipulation. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dplyr.

Williams, Graham. 2023. 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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