So far in this series, we used vectors from built-in datasets (rivers, women and nhtemp), or created them by stringing together several numbers with the c function (e.g. c(1, 2, 3, 4)). R offers an extremely useful shortcut to create vectors of the latter kind, which is the colon : operator. Instead of having to […]
Exercises (beginner)
Vectors and Functions
In the previous set we started with arithmetic operations on vectors. We’ll take this a step further now, by practising functions to summarize, sort and round the elements of a vector. Sofar, the functions we have practised (log, sqrt, exp, sin, cos, and acos) always return a vector with the same length as the input […]
Working With Vectors
In the previous exercise set we practised vectors as a data structure. As I noted at the beginning of that set, perhaps you were already familiar with data in a vector-like structure in other applications such as Microsoft Excel or SPSS. If so, perhaps you also used those data to carry out calculations. In this […]
Creating vectors
A vector is the most elementary way to store and structure data in R. For now, think of it as a list of numbers, which can be as short as a single number, or as long as about 2 billion(!) numbers. Perhaps you were used to working with lists of numbers already in a spreadsheet […]
Step Up Your Dashboard With Shinydashboard – Part 1: Exercises
The shinydashboard package provides a well-designed dashboard theme for Shiny apps and allows for an easy assembly of a dashboard from a couple of basic building blocks. The package is widely used in commercial environments as well, due to its neat features for building convenient and robust layouts. This exercise set will help you practice […]
Fighting Factors with Cats: Exercises
In this exercise set, we will practice using the forcats factor manipulation package by Hadley Wickham. In the last exercise set, we saw that it is entirely possible to deal with factors in base R, but also that things can get a bit involved and un-intuitive. Forcats simplifies many common factor manipulation tasks and […]
Facing the Facts about Factors: Exercises
Factor variables in R can be mind-boggling. Often, you can just avoid them and use characters vectors instead – just don’t forget to set stringsAsFactors=FALSE. They are, however, very useful in some circumstances, such as statistical modelling and presenting data in graphs and tables. Relying on factors but misunderstanding them has been known to “eat […]
How To Create a Flexdashboard: Exercises
INTRODUCTION With flexdashboard, you can easily create interactive dashboards for R. What is amazing about it is that with R Markdown, you can publish a group of related data visualizations as a dashboard. Additionally, it supports a wide variety of components, including htmlwidgets; base, lattice, and grid graphics; tabular data; gauges and value boxes […]
How To Plot With Patchwork: Exercises
INTRODUCTION The goal of patchwork is to make it simple to combine separate ggplots into the same graphic. It tries to solve the same problem as gridExtra::grid.arrange() and cowplot::plot_grid, but using an API that incites exploration and iteration. Before proceeding, please follow our short tutorial. Look at the examples given and try to understand the […]
Programmatically Creating Text Outputs in R: Exercises
In the age of Rmarkdown and Shiny, or when making any custom output from your data, you want your output to look consistent and neat. Also, when writing your output, you often want it to obtain a specific (decorative) format defined by the html or LaTeX engine. These exercises are an opportunity to refresh our […]
