I have recently taken some online courses in the statistical package called ‘R’ that is freely available in the public domain. After a little effort, I was able to instal this on my Macbook. It creates beautiful plots and is a very versatile and powerful aid to understanding big data.
After installation of R Studio, and the installation of the necessary packages and libraries, I was able to get to work in understanding it. I decided to take the free online courses on edX for a start. Data Science R Basicsย is an introduction to the nuts and bolts of R including data frames, data types and function calls, conditionals and for loops. Data Science: Visualizationย is an introduction to ggplot and its features and explains how to select and summarize data from a data frame according to logical conditions.
I thoroughly recommend the courses by edXย as they track your progress unit by unit and include ideos and explanatory material.
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Above are some sample plots extracted from data sets containing life expectancy, fertility and income statistics. Such data sets are available as add-ons free of charge as is everything with R.
Here is one plot that I made after a few days studying the online material.
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