The objective of these computer exercises is to become familiar with the basic structure of R and to learn some more sophisticated tips and tricks of R. The R code to perform the analyses, together with the output, is given in a separate file. However, you are strongly advised to write the code yourself. Questions are posed to reflect on what you are doing and to study output and results in more detail.
If you have not done so already, start R via Starten - Alle programma’s - R - R 4.4.0 (older versions of R should also be fine). This opens the R console. R is a command line driven environment. This means that you have to type in commands (line-by-line) for it to compute or calculate something. In its simplest form R can therefore be used as a pocket calculator:
2+2
# [1] 4
Question 1. (a) Look up today’s exchange rate of the euro versus the US$ on the Internet. Use R to calculate how many US$ is 15 euro.
(b) Round the number you found to the second decimal
using function round
(use help
or
?
to inspect the arguments of the function) and assign the
result to an object curr
.
(c) Use mode
, str
, and
summary
to inspect the object you created. These functions
give a compact display of the type of object and its contents.
Luckily R is more than just a calculator, it is a programming language with most of the elements that every programming language has: statements, objects, types, classes etc.
Question 2. (a) One of the simplest data structures
in R is a vector. Use the function seq
to generate a vector
vec
that consists of all numbers from 11 to 30 (see
?seq
for documentation).
(b) Select the 7th element of the vector.
(c) Select all elements except the 15th.
(d) Select the 2nd and 5th element of the vector.
(e) Select only the odd valued elements of the
vector vec
. Do this is in two steps: first create the
appropriate vector of indices index
using the function
seq
, then use index
to make the selection.
Until now you have only used the R console. However, RStudio (Starten - Alle programma’s - R - RStudio) provides a much nicer and richer interface when working with R. Although all exercises can be made within the basic R environment, we highly recommend to use RStudio.
Question 3. (a) What are the windows that RStudio consists of?
From now on we advise you to use RStudio. You can use either the Console or the Script window (the upper left window). We recommend you to use the Script window, since this allows you to easily save your code to a file for later usage.
(b) Use the elementary functions /
,
-
, ^
and the functions sum
and
length
to calculate the mean \(\bar{x}=\sum_i x_i/n\) and the standard
deviation \(\sqrt{\sum_i(x_i-\bar{x})^2/(n-1)}\) of the
vector vec
of all numbers from 11 to 30. You can verify
your answer by using the built-in R functions mean
and
sd
.
(c) Once you completed the analysis, have a look at the Environment and History windows. Do you understand their contents?
Question 4. R comes with many predefined datasets.
You can type data()
to get the whole list. The
islands
dataset gives the areas of the world’s major
landmasses exceeding 10,000 square miles. It can be loaded by
typing:
# This could in this case actually be skipped since the package datasets is
# already loaded
data(islands)
(a) Inspect the object using the functions
head
, str
etc. Also have a look at
the help file using help(islands)
.
(b) How many landmasses in the world exceeding 10,000 square miles are there?
(c) Make a Boolean vector that has the value
TRUE
for all landmasses exceeding 20,000 square miles.
(d) Select the islands with landmasses exceeding 20,000 square miles.
(e) Make a character vector that only contains the names of the islands.
(f) The Moluccas have mistakenly been counted as a
single island. The largest island of the Moluccas, Halmahera, only has
about 7,000 square miles. Remove Moluccas from the data. Hint: an
elegant solution uses the Boolean operator !=
.
Question 5. (a) Create a character matrix
M
with 6 rows and three columns containing the first
eighteen letters of the Roman alphabet (hint: see
?letters
). Fill the matrix column-wise.
(b) Which is the letter on the fifth row and second column?
(c) Replace the letters in the last column of
M
with the last six letters of the Roman alphabet.
(d) Make a character vector containing all the
vowels and use this vector to replace the vowels in M
with
the character string “vowel”.
(e) Now replace all consonants in M
with the character string “consonant”.
(f) Count the number of elements in M
that are equal to “consonant” and “vowel” respectively.
Question 6. We are going to use yet another
predefined dataset: mtcars
. These data were extracted from
the 1974 Motor Trend US magazine, and comprise fuel consumption and 10
aspects of automobile design and performance for 32 automobiles (1973–74
models). See ?mtcars
for the definition of the variables
contained in it.
(a) What kind of data structure is the
mtcars
data?
(b) How many car models can ride more than 25 miles per gallon?
(c) What are the names of the car models that can ride more than 25 miles per gallon?
(d) Select the car models that can ride less than 22 miles per gallon and have more than 6 cylinders.
(e) In addition to the previous selection, also select the car models that either have more than 3 carburetors or weigh less than 3500 lbs. How many car models satisfy these conditions?
(f) The variable am
is a numeric
variable that indicates the type of transmission:
Add a variable called am_char
to the mtcars
data set where you recode the variable am
and replace 0 by
“automatic” and 1 by “manual”.
We will work with a data set that gives the survival status of passengers on the Titanic. See titanic3info.txt for a description of the variables. Some background information on the data can be found on titanic.html.
Question 7. (a) Download the titanic
data set titanic3.dta
in STATA format from the course
website and import it into R using the function
read.dta
. Do not use the function read_dta
from the haven package nor the ‘Import Dataset’ option
in RStudio. This leads to slight differences in the imported data which
may lead to problems in some of the exercises. Give the data set an
appropriate name as an R object. E.g., we can call it
titanic3
(but feel free to give it another name). Before
importing the data, you first have to load the foreign
package in which the function read.dta
is defined.
Moreover, you probably will need to point R to the right folder where
you saved the file titanic3.dta
. You can do this by
changing the so-called working directory, which will be
explained later. Using the basic R environment you can do this via the
menu (File - Change dir), and similarly for RStudio
(Session - Set Working Directory - Choose
Directory).
We take a look at the values in the titanic
data
set.
(b) First, make the whole data set visible in a spreadsheet like format (how this is done depends on whether base R or RStudio is used).
(c) Often, it is sufficient to show a few records of
the total data set. This can be done via selections on the rows, but
another option is to use the functions head
and
tail
. Use these functions to inspect the first 4 and last 4
records (instead of 6 which is the default).
The function dim
can be used to find the number of rows
(passengers in this case) and columns (variables) in the data.
dim(titanic3)
An alternative is the function str
. This function shows
information per column (type of variable, first records, levels in case
of factor variables) as well as the total number of rows and
columns.
str(titanic3)
(d) Issue both commands and study the output.
(e) Summarize the data set by using the
summary
function.
This gives a summary of all the variables in the data set. We can see
that for categorical variables like pclass
a frequency
distribution is given, whereas for continuous variables like
age
numerical summaries are given. Still, for some
variables we do not automatically get what we would like or expect:
survived
is dichotomous with values zero
and one, which are interpreted as numbers.pclass
is represented
differently from the categorical variable home.dest
.dob
, which gives the date of birth, is
represented by large negative numbers.In subsequent exercises, we will shed further light on these anomalies and we will try to repair some of these.
Question 8. We can also summarize specific columns
(variables) of a data.frame
. There are many ways to
summarize a variable, depending on its structure and variability. For
continuous variables, the same summary
function can be
used, but other options are the functions mean
,
quantile
, IQR
, sd
and
var
. For categorical summaries, one may use
summary
and table
. Note that missing values
are treated differently depending on the function used.
(a) Summarize the age variable in the
titanic
data set (the age column is selected via
titanic3$age
). Give the 5%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 95% quantiles
and the inter-quartile range. You may have to take a look at the help
files for the functions.
(b) Summarize the survived
variable
using the table
function. Also give a two-by-two table for
sex and survival status using the same table
function.
Question 9 (OPTIONAL).
Instead of the file in STATA format, we also made available part of
the titanic
data set in tab-delimited format
(titanic3select.txt
). Download this file from the course
website and then import it using the command
read.table
. Note that this file has been manipulated in
Excel and that importing the data is not as straightforward as you would
have hoped. You will need to tweak the arguments of
read.table
and/or make some changes to the file
manually.
Question 10. We have a further look at the output
from the summary
function, which was not always what we
would like to see. First, give the commands (sapply
will be
explained later):
sapply(titanic3, mode)
# pclass survived name sex age sibsp
# "numeric" "numeric" "character" "numeric" "numeric" "numeric"
# parch ticket fare cabin embarked boat
# "numeric" "character" "numeric" "numeric" "numeric" "numeric"
# body home.dest dob family agecat
# "numeric" "character" "numeric" "numeric" "numeric"
sapply(titanic3, is.factor)
# pclass survived name sex age sibsp parch ticket
# TRUE FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE
# fare cabin embarked boat body home.dest dob family
# FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE
# agecat
# TRUE
We see that survived
has mode “numeric” and is not a
factor
(is.factor(titanic3$survived)
gives
FALSE
). It is interpreted in the same way as the truly
continuous variable age
.
(a) Add a variable status
to the
titanic
data set, which gives the survival status of the
passengers as a factor variable with labels “no” and “yes” describing
whether individuals survived. Make the value “no” the first level (see
titanic3info.txt
for the reason).
(b) Variable pclass
has mode “numeric”
and is a factor
, whereas home.dest
has mode
“character” and is not a factor
. Give the commands
as.numeric(head(titanic3$pclass))
as.numeric(head(titanic3$home.dest))
and explain the difference in output.
We do not change the variables in this dataset that have mode “character”. They are variables that have many different values, and there is no reason to convert them into factors.
Question 11. (a) Take a look at the name
(name
), and the home town/destination
(home.dest
) of all passengers who were older than 70 years.
Use the appropriate selection functions.
(b) There is one person from Uruguay in this group. Select the single record from that person. Did this person travel with relatives?
(c) Make a table of survivor status by sex, but only
for the first class passengers. Use the xtabs
function.
The graphics subsystem of R offers a very flexible toolbox for high-quality graphing. There are typically three steps to producing useful graphics:
In the graphics model that R uses, a figure region consists of a
central plotting region surrounded by margins. The basic graphics
command is plot
. The following piece of code illustrates
the most common options:
plot(3,3,main="Main title",sub="subtitle",xlab="x-label",ylab="y-label")
text(3.5,3.5,"text at (3.5,3.5)")
abline(h=3.5,v=3.5)
for (side in 1:4) mtext(-1:4,side=side,at=2.3,line=-1:4)
mtext(paste("side",1:4),side=1:4,line=-1,font=2)
In this figure one can see that
You might want to use the help
function to investigate
some of the other functions and options.
Plots can be further finetuned with the par
function.
For instance, the default margin sizes can be changed using
par
. The default settings are
par("mar")
# [1] 5.1 4.1 4.1 2.1
This explains why only side 1 in the figure had a wide enough margin. This can be remedied by setting
par(mar=c(5,5,5,5))
before plotting the figure.
Question 12. (a) Try making this figure yourself by executing the code shown above.
(b) Save the figure you just made to a file. For
this you have to know that R sends graphics to a device. The
default device on most operating systems is the screen, for example the
“Plots” window in RStudio. Saving a figure, therefore, requires changing
R’s current device. See help(device)
for the options. Save
the figure you just made to a png
and a pdf
file. Don’t forget to close the device afterwards.
(c) When saving a figure to file, default values for
the figure size are used. Save the figure to a pdf
file
with width and height of 21 inches.
Question 13. The quakes
data set gives
location and severity of earthquakes off Fuji. First load the data:
data(quakes)
(a) Make a scatterplot of latitude versus longitude. You should obtain a graph similar to:
(b) Use cut
to divide the magnitude of
quakes into three categories (cutoffs at 4.5 and 5) and use
ifelse
to divide depth into two categories (cutoff at 400).
Hint: have a careful look at the (admittedly complicated) help page of
cut
, in particular the arguments breaks
and
include.lowest
.
(c) Redraw the plot, with symbols by magnitude and colors by depth. You should obtain a graph similar to:
(d) The magnitude of the earthquakes is given in Richter scale. Calculate the energy released in each earthquake as \(10^{(3/2)}\) to the power of the Richter magnitude.
(e) The cex
argument of
plot
can be used to scale the plot symbols. We will scale
the plot symbols so that the surface of the plot symbol is proportional
to the released energy. Calculate plot symbol size as the square root of
the energy divided by the median square root of the energy (to get
median symbol size 1).
(f) Plot the magnitude of earthquakes again, but with plot symbols sized by energy. Keep the coloring by depth. You should obtain a graph similar to:
Question 14. Different plots can be combined in a
single window (device) via , e.g., par(mfrow=c(..))
or
layout(..)
. Combine the histogram and the two boxplots for
the titanic
data from the lecture into a single plot. Find
a nice layout of your final plot, see help files for setting proper
margins, etc. You should obtain a graph similar to: