Reading data from the web

Welcome to Helsinki Open Data Science: Regression and Model validation.

The first step of data analysis with R is reading data into R. This is done with a function. Which function and function arguments to use to do this, depends on the original format of the data.

Conveniently in R, the same functions for reading data can usually be used weather the data is saved locally on your computer or is located behind a web URL.

After the correct function has been identified and data read into R, the data will usually be in R's data.frame format. A data frame's dimensions are (\(n\),\(d\)), where \(n\) is the number of rows (the observations) and \(d\) the number of columns (the variables).

This exercise is part of the course

Helsinki Open Data Science

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Exercise instructions

Read the lrn14 data frame to memory with read.table(). There is information related to the data here
Use dim() on the data frame to look at the dimensions of the data. How many rows and colums does the data have?
Look at the structure of the data with str().

Hands-on interactive exercise

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


# read the data into memory
lrn14 <- read.table("http://www.helsinki.fi/~kvehkala/JYTmooc/JYTOPKYS3-data.txt", sep="\t", header=TRUE)

# Look at the dimensions of the data


# Look at the structure of the data

Edit and Run Code