Chapter 2 The Richness of Data

Image courtesy of Jonathan Weicher

The aim this chapter is to explore the diversity and availability of data (both quantitative and qualitative) and then look at some of the structures for representing and analysing data in R. Then we revisit how to import and export data as files and how to interact with databases. Finally, we briefly consider some issues relating to very large data sets, often referred to as “big data”.

As a word of warning, this chapter intentionally covers a considerable breadth of material. Some topics, in particular databases and big data, will need to be further investigated before you will be able to easily access them using R code. For now an appreciation of the issues will be sufficient.