R Assignment – Basic Data Loading and Transformations
Page 1 of 1
Assignment – Loading Data into a Data Frame
Above: fivethirtyeight.com article on librarians with github repo and raw csv file for supporting data
We are often tasked with taking data in one form and transforming it for easier downstream analysis. We will
spend several weeks in this course on tidying and transformation operations. Some of this work could be done in
SQL or R (or Python or…). Here, you are asked to use R—you may use any base functions or packages as you like.
Your task is to first choose one of the provided datasets on fivethirtyeight.com that you find interesting:
https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/
You should first study the data and any other information on the GitHub site, and read the associated
fivethirtyeight.com article.
To receive full credit, you should:
1. Take the data, and create one or more code blocks. You should finish with a data frame that contains a
subset of the columns in your selected dataset. If there is an obvious target (aka predictor or independent)
variable, you should include this in your set of columns. You should include (or add if necessary)
meaningful column names and replace (if necessary) any non-intuitive abbreviations used in the data that
you selected. For example, if you had instead been tasked with working with the UCI mushroom dataset,
you would include the target column for edible or poisonous, and transform “e” values to “edible.” Your
lutions in next week’s meetup!
