3.2 Descriptive statistics
Now let’s calculate some basic statistics on the entire dataset. We’ll calculate the mean age, maximum height, and number of pirates of each sex:
# What is the mean age?
mean(pirates$age)
## [1] 27
# What was the tallest pirate?
max(pirates$height)
## [1] 209
# How many pirates are there of each sex?
table(pirates$sex)
##
## female male other
## 464 490 46
Now, let’s calculate statistics for different groups of pirates. For example, the following code will use the aggregate()
function to calculate the mean age of pirates, separately for each sex.
# Calculate the mean age, separately for each sex
aggregate(formula = age ~ sex,
data = pirates,
FUN = mean)
## sex age
## 1 female 30
## 2 male 25
## 3 other 27