Welcome

This book is a work in progress for an introductory course on Concepts in Computing with Data from a decisively exploratory data analysis perspective.

A word about Computing with Data

By “Computing with Data” we mean John Chambers’ description:

“Computing with data refers to activities in which data is acquired, managed, and processed for a great variety of purposes: organization, visualization, summaries, analysis, etc.”

John Chambers

Our definition of “Computing with Data” is thus related to principles and practices in data analysis, combined with computational tools for managing data (emphasis on tabular data), data visualization, programming concepts for data analysis, as well as report-and-communication of results, which are omnipresent activities in every Data Analysis project.

Why R?

We use R as the main analytical and statistical software for most of the examples and exercises. It is possible that you find this too limiting or too biased. In some sense yes, there is definitely a bias towards choosing R. But such a bias will always be present anytime you choose a specific language.

We will teach you the basics of R, covering how to manipulate objects (vectors, arrays, data frames, lists, etc.). We also cover data manipulation, reshaping, tidying, etc. Likewise, you will learn basics for graphing data, both in static and interactive modes.