Viewing your data

Now we have become acquainted with our working directories and the R environment, its time to explore our newely imported data. For this, we will be using the weeds dataset. Ensure your data is loaded in and then either use the View() command:

weeds <- read.csv("weeds.csv")
View(weeds)
# This will open up a new tab to view your data

or click the variable name in the environment window.

This should bring up a separate tab in Rstudio which you should be able to see the 4 columns (weeds, soil, species & flowers.m3).
Now we can see our data, we can investigate the way R has input our data. The best thing to do is to ensure your categorical variables are categorical, and our continuous are continuous, much like we do in programs like JMP.

In JMP, we have the icons to identify categorical/nominal, ordinal or continuous. In R, all we do is run a single line of code to view the same thing across the different columns.

str(weeds)
## 'data.frame':    48 obs. of  4 variables:
##  $ weeds     : Factor w/ 2 levels "native","weed": 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ...
##  $ soil      : Factor w/ 2 levels "sandstone","shale": 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
##  $ species   : Factor w/ 3 levels "Coprosma","Olearia",..: 1 1 1 1 3 3 3 3 2 2 ...
##  $ flowers.m3: int  14 17 23 26 35 45 36 28 28 39 ...
# str stands for "structure" and will tell us the formats of each data column, as well as the number of levels when we have a factor (categorical) column

str() also shows us the number of levels we have in a factor. So if we put in a bad dataset with different capitalisations or misspellings on factor levels, we can identify here how many we want vs. how many we have. Its a quick and easy way to assess your data.

As you can see in the weeds example, we have weeds, soil & species as factors (categorical) and flowers.m3 as an integer (one of many continuous data types, in this case, whole numbers).

We will follow up on how to fix an incorrect column shortly

Other data viewing commands can be used to view certain aspects of your data without bringing up the entire data set in a new tab. These are as follows:

head(weeds) # This will show the top few rows of your data so you can check it without loading the entire table
##   weeds      soil   species flowers.m3
## 1  weed sandstone  Coprosma         14
## 2  weed sandstone  Coprosma         17
## 3  weed sandstone  Coprosma         23
## 4  weed sandstone  Coprosma         26
## 5  weed sandstone Pultenaea         35
## 6  weed sandstone Pultenaea         45
tail(weeds) # The same as head() but shows the bottom rows
##     weeds  soil   species flowers.m3
## 43 native shale Pultenaea         49
## 44 native shale Pultenaea         20
## 45 native shale   Olearia         32
## 46 native shale   Olearia         51
## 47 native shale   Olearia         47
## 48 native shale   Olearia         55
dim(weeds) # This gives you the number of rows and columns
## [1] 48  4
# You can also use nrow(weeds) or ncol(weeds) to get them separately

names(weeds) # Gives you the column names. 
## [1] "weeds"      "soil"       "species"    "flowers.m3"
# I use this when I want the exact name for a column when I am writing analyses (you will see later how useful this can be)

summary(weeds) # Gives you summary statistics for each column
##     weeds           soil         species     flowers.m3   
##  native:24   sandstone:24   Coprosma :16   Min.   :13.00  
##  weed  :24   shale    :24   Olearia  :16   1st Qu.:22.50  
##                             Pultenaea:16   Median :33.00  
##                                            Mean   :33.81  
##                                            3rd Qu.:45.50  
##                                            Max.   :57.00
# This will also come in handy later for statistical analysis 

As you can see, there are many ways to view data within R. Some of these are useful for huge datasets (> 10k rows) as the view() command can put strain on your computer. Using head() or tail() to view aspects of the data is useful as it reduces how much is displayed.

After reading in dataset, use the summary() command with the “insecticide”" dataset to answer the following questions:
Question: What is the minimum value for species richness?

Answer

Question: What is the maximum value for species richness?

Answer