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Dataframes: What's a data frame?

You may remember the matrix, a multi-dimensional object that we discussed earlier. All the elements that you put in a matrix should be of the same type. However, when performing a market research survey, you often have questions such as:

  • 'Are your married?' or 'yes/no' questions (= boolean data type)
  • 'How old are you?' (= numeric data type)
  • 'What is your opinion on this product?' or other 'open-ended' questions (= character data type)

The output, namely the respondents' answers to the questions formulated above, is a data set of different data types. You will often find yourself working with data sets that contain different data types instead of only one. A data frame has the variables of a data set as columns and the observations as rows. This will be a familiar concept for those coming from different statistical software packages such as SAS or SPSS.

This exercise is part of the course

Basic Statistics

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Exercise instructions

  • print the object mtcars to the console.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# print mtcars to the console
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