22 Importing Tables in R

In this chapter, you will learn the basics for importing data tables in R.

22.1 Abalone Data Set

The data set for this lab is the Abalone Data Set that is part of the UCI Machine Learning Repository

The location of the data file is:

http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/abalone/abalone.data

The location of the data dictionary (description of the data) is:

http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/abalone/abalone.names

Look at both the dataset file, and the file with its description, and answer the following questions:

  • What’s the character delimiter?
  • Is there a row for column names?
  • Are there any missing values? If so, how are they codified?
  • What is the data type of each column?

22.1.1 Getting a Local Copy of the Data

One basic way to read this file in R is by passing the url location of the file directly to any of the read.table() functions:

url <- "http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/abalone/abalone.data"
abalone <- read.table(url, sep = ",")

My suggestion when reading datasets from the Web, is to always try to get a local copy of the data file in your machine (as long as you have enough free space to save it in your computer). To do this, you can use the function download.file() and specify the url address, and the name of the file that will be created in your computer. For instance, to save the abalone data file in your working directory, type the following commands directly on the R console:

# do NOT include this code in your Rmd file
# download it to your working directory
origin <- 'http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/abalone/abalone.data'
destination <- 'abalone.data'
download.file(origin, destination)

22.2 Basic Importing

Now that you have a local copy of the dataset, you can read it in R with read.table() like so:

# reading data from your working directory
abalone <- read.table("abalone.data", sep = ",")

Keep in mind that the above command will work as long as the data file is in your working directory. After reading in a data table, you may want to start looking at its contents, usually taking a peek at a few rows. This can be done with head() and/or with tail():

# take a peek of first rows
head(abalone)
# take a peek of last rows
tail(abalone)

Likewsie, you may also want to examine how R has decided to take care of the storage details (what data type is used for each column). Use the function str() to check the structure of the data frame:

# check data frame's structure
str(abalone, vec.len = 1)

22.2.1 Detailed information about the columns

So far we have been able to read the data file in R. But we are missing a few things. First, we don’t have names for the columns. Second, it would be nice if we could specify the data types of each column instead of letting R guess how to handle each data type.

Look at the data description (see “Attribute information”) in the following link:

http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/abalone/abalone.names

According to the description of the Abalone data set, we could assign the following data types to each of the columns as:

Name Data Type
Sex character
Length continuous
Diameter continuous
Height continuous
Whole weight continuous
Shucked weight continuous
Viscera weight continuous
Shell weight continuous
Rings integer

22.2.2 Your Turn

  • Create a vector column_names for the name of each column. Use the variable names displayed in the section “7. Attributes Information”:

    • Sex
    • Length
    • Diameter
    • Height
    • Whole
    • Shucked
    • Viscera
    • Shell
    • Rings

  • Create another vector column_types with R data types (e.g. character, real, integer). Match the R data types with the suggested type in “7. Attributes Information” (nominal = character, continuous = real, integer = integer).

  • Optionally, you could also specify a type "factor" for the variable sex since this is supposed to be in nominal scale (i.e. it is a categorical variable). Also note that the variable rings is supposed to be integers, therefore we can choose an integer vector for this column.

  • Look at the documentation of the function read.table() and try to read the abalone.data table in R. Find out which arguments you need to specify so that you pass your vectors column_names and column_types to read.table(). Read in the data as abalone, and then check its structure with str().

  • Now re-read abalone.data with the read.csv() function. Name this data as abalone2, and check its structure with str().

  • How would you read just the first 10 lines in abalone.data? Name this data as abalone10, and check its structure with str().

  • How would you skip the first 10 lines in abalone.data, in order to read the next 10 lines (lines 11-20)? Name this data as abalone20, and check its structure with str().

  • Read the documentation of read.table() about the argument colClasses. What happens when you specify the data-type of one or more columns as "NULL"?

  • Use the following functions to start examining descriptive aspects about the abalone data frame:

    • str()
    • summary()
    • head() and tail()
    • dim()
    • names()
    • colnames()
    • nrow()
    • ncol()

  • Use R functions to compute descriptive statistics, and confirm the following statistics. Your output does not have to be in the same format of the table below. The important thing is that you begin learning how to manipulate columns (or vectors) of a data.frame.

       Length Diam  Height  Whole  Shucked  Viscera    Shell    Rings
Min    0.075  0.055 0.000   0.002    0.001    0.001    0.002        1
Max    0.815  0.650 1.130   2.826    1.488    0.760    1.005       29
Mean   0.524  0.408 0.140   0.829    0.359    0.181    0.239    9.934
SD     0.120  0.099 0.042   0.490    0.222    0.110    0.139    3.224

22.3 Filtering, Slicing, and Selecting

The second part of this lab involves learning about basic manipulation tasks of data tables.

Perhaps the most basic operations have to do with selecting rows and columns. Analysts tend to refer to these operations in various ways: filtering, slicing, and selecting. Here’s a description of such operations.

Slicing has to do with selecting rows by indicating their index position. Using bracket notation, you pass a numeric vector for the rows:

# first three rows
three_rows <- abalone[1:3, ]
three_rows

Filtering involves selecting rows by specifying a certain (logical) condition. The selected rows will be those for which the condition is TRUE.

# subset rows given a condition
# (length greater than 0.6)
gt <- abalone[abalone$length > 0.6]
gt

Selecting has to do with selecting columns by name (or position). Using bracket notation, you pass a character vector with the names of the columns for the column-index:

length_diam <- abalone[ ,c('Length', 'Diameter')]
head(length_diam)

Your Turn

  • slice the data by selecting the first 5 rows

  • slice the data by selecting rows 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, …, 50.

  • slice the data by selecting the last 5 rows; try doing this without using tail(), and without hard coding the numbers of the alst five rows.

  • create a data frame height14 by filtering the data with those abalones with Height less than 0.14, and display its dimensions with dim()

  • create a data frame infant by filtering the data about Infant abalones, and display its dimensions with dim()

  • create a data frame male_female by filtering the data with Male and Female abalones, and display its dimensions with dim()

  • filter the data with those abalones with more than 25 Rings, displaying only their Sex, and Rings.

  • filter the data with those infant abalones with more than 3 Rings and less than 6, displaying only their Sex, Rings, and Diameter.

22.3.1 Adding new variables and Sorting rows

Another basic data-table manipulation task involves adding new variables. Let’s create a small data frame abies by filtering only infant abalones, and gathering columns Length, Height, and Diameter:

# creating a small data frame
abies <- abalone[abalone$Sex == 'I', c('Length', 'Height', 'Diameter')]

Say you want to add a column Ht_Len to abies with the ratio height / length. Here’s how to do it:

abies$Ht_Len <- abies$Height / abies$Length

Another common type of task consists of reordering rows. For example, say you want to get a data frame abies2 by ordering the rows in abies by Length in decreasing order:

abies2 <- abies[order(abies$Length, decreasing = TRUE), ]

Your Turn

  • using the data frame abies, add a new variable product with the product of Whole and Shucked.

  • create a new data frame abies3, by adding columns log_height and log_length with the log transformations of height and length.

  • use the original data frame abalone to filter and arrange those abalones with height less than 0.12, in increasing order.

  • display a data frame with the Sex, Diameter, and Rings, of the top-5 highest abalones

  • display a data frame with the Sex, Diameter, and Rings, of the top-5 longest abalones

22.3.2 Basic Plots

As you can tell, the abalone data contains 9 variables. To start exploring the content, we begin by producing charts for each single variable, focused on looking at their distributions:

  • Quantitative variables: histogram, boxplot
  • Qualitative variables: barchart, piechart

When examining a factor (or any categorical variable) you can always create a frequency table first—via table()—and then plot a barchart with barplot()

table_sex <- table(abalone$Sex)
barplot(table_sex)

Alternativey, you can also create a piechart with pie().

For a quantitative variable, the typical graphics to examine the distribution are histograms (hist()) and boxplots (boxplot())

hist(abalone$Diameter)
boxplot(abalone$Diameter, horizontal = TRUE)

Your Turn

The workhorse plotting function in base R is plot(). This function is actually a method, meaning that it behaves differently depending on the type of input.

Find out what kind of graphic is returned by plot() when you pass it the following inputs:

  • a numeric variable: e.g. abalone$Height

  • a factor: e.g. Sex

  • two numeric variables: e.g. abalone$Height and abalone$Length

  • a data frame with two numeric columns: e.g. Height, and Length

  • a data frame with more than two numeric columns: Height, Length, and Diameter

  • a 2-column data frame with one factor in the first column, and one numeric vector in the second column: e.g. Sex and Length

  • a 2-column data frame with one numeric vector in the first column, and one factor in the second column: e.g. Length and Sex

Perhaps the most common use of plot() is to create scatter diagrams (i.e. scatterplots). Actually, the deafult scatterplot function is plot.deafult().

Look at the documentation of plot(), plot.default(), the graphical parameters par(), as well as points(), and experiment with several scatterplots specifying arguments like:

  • point character: pch (see ?points)
  • point color(s): col (see `?points)
  • point size: cex (see ?cex)
  • x-axis label: xlab (see ?plot)
  • y-axis label: ylab (see ?plot)
  • title: main (see ?plot)
  • subtitle: sub (see ?plot)
  • logarithmic transformation of x and/or y: log (see ?plot.default)
  • feel free to play with other graphical parameters

22.3.3 Summary Slides