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Collection Highlights

Data Mining and Data Warehousing: Principles and Practical

Techniques 1st Edition Parteek Bhatia

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and

Techniques Fourth Edition Ian H. Witten

Data Mining and Big Data Ying Tan

Data Mining Techniques for the Life Sciences 2nd Edition

Oliviero Carugo
Data Mining Yee Ling Boo

Mobile Data Mining Yuan Yao

Transparent Data Mining for Big and Small Data 1st Edition
Tania Cerquitelli

Data Mining Models David L. Olson

Learning Data Mining with Python Layton

R Data Mining

Implement data mining techniques through practical

use cases and real-world datasets

Andrea Cirillo

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
R Data Mining
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 About the Author
Andrea Cirillo is currently working as an audit quantitative analyst at Intesa Sanpaolo
Banking Group. He gained financial and external audit experience at Deloitte Touche
Tohmatsu and internal audit experience at FNM, a listed Italian company. His main
responsibilities involve the evaluation of credit risk management models and their
enhancement, mainly within the field of the Basel III capital agreement. He is married to
Francesca and is the father of Tommaso, Gianna, Zaccaria, and Filippo. Andrea has written
and contributed to a few useful R packages such as updateR, ramazon, and paletteR, and
regularly shares insightful advice and tutorials on R programming. His research and work
mainly focus on the use of R in the fields of risk management and fraud detection, largely
by modeling custom algorithms and developing interactive applications.

Andrea has previously authored RStudio for R Statistical Computing Cookbook for Packt
Publishing.

To Cesca, Tommaso, Gianna, Zaccaria and Filippo.

 About the Reviewers
Enrico Pegoraro graduated in statistics from the Italian University of Padua more than 20
years ago. He says that "he has experienced in himself the fast-growing computer science and
statistics worlds". He has worked on projects involving databases, software development,
programming languages, data integration, Linux, Windows, and cloud computing. He is
currently working as a freelance statistician and data scientist.

Enrico has gained more than 10 years of experience with R and other statistical software
training and consulting activities, with a special focus on Six Sigma, industrial statistical
analysis, and corporate training courses. He is also a partner of the main company
supporting the MilanoR Italian community. In this company, he works as a freelance
principal data scientist, as well as teacher of statistical models and data mining with R
training courses.

In his first job, Enrico collaborated with Italian medical institutions, contributing to some
regional projects/publications on nosocomial infections. His main expertise is in consulting
and teaching statistical modeling, data mining, data science, medical statistics, predictive
models, SPC, and industrial statistics. Enrico planning to develop an Italian-language
website dedicated to R (www.r-project.it).

Enrico can be contacted at [email protected].

I would like to thank all the people who support me and my activities, particularly my
partner, Sonja, and her son, Gianluca.
Doug Ortiz is an enterprise cloud, big data, data analytics, and solutions architect who has
been architecting, designing, developing, and integrating enterprise solutions throughout
his career. Organizations that leverage his skillset have been able to rediscover and reuse
their underutilized data via existing and emerging technologies such as Amazon Web
Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Microsoft BI Stack, Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL
databases, and SharePoint along with related toolsets and technologies.

He is also the founder of Illustris, LLC and can be reached at [email protected].

Some interesting aspects of his profession are:

Experience in integrating multiple platforms and products

Big data, data science, R, and Python Certifications
He helps organizations gain a deeper understanding of the value of their current
investments in data and existing resources, turning them into useful sources of
information
He has improved, salvaged, and architected projects by utilizing unique and
innovative techniques
He regularly reviews books on Amazon Web Services, data science, machine
learning, R, and cloud technologies

His hobbies are yoga and scuba diving.

I would like to thank my wonderful wife, Mila, for all her help and support, as well as
Maria, Nikolay, and our wonderful children.
Radovan Kavicky is the principal data scientist and president at GapData Institute, based in
Bratislava, Slovakia, where he harnesses the power of data and wisdom of economics for
public good. He is a macroeconomist by education, and consultant and analyst by
profession (8+ years of experience in consulting for clients from the public and private
sector), with strong mathematical and analytical skills. He is able to deliver top-level
research and analytical work. From MATLAB, SAS, and Stata, he switched to Python, R and
Tableau.

Radovan is an evangelist of open data and a member of the Slovak Economic Association
(SEA), Open Budget Initiative, Open Government Partnership, and the global Tableau
#DataLeader network (2017). He is the founder of PyData Bratislava, R <- Slovakia, and the
SK/CZ Tableau User Group (skczTUG). He has been a speaker at @TechSummit (Bratislava,
2017) and @PyData (Berlin, 2017).

You can follow him on Twitter at @radovankavicky, @GapDataInst or @PyDataBA. His

full profile and experience are available at https:/​/​www.​linkedin.​com/​in/
radovankavicky/​ and https:/​/​github.​com/​radovankavicky.

GapData Institute: https:/​/​www.​gapdata.​org.

Oleg Okun is a machine learning expert and author/editor of four books, numerous journal
articles, and many conference papers. His career spans more than a quarter of a century. He
was employed in both academia and industry in his mother country, Belarus, and abroad
(Finland, Sweden, and Germany). His work experience includes document image analysis,
fingerprint biometrics, bioinformatics, online/offline marketing analytics, credit scoring
analytics, and text analytics.

He is interested in all aspects of distributed machine learning and the Internet of Things.
Oleg currently lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my parents for everything that they have
done for me.
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 Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Why to Choose R for Your Data Mining and Where to Start 6
What is R? 7
A bit of history 8
R's points of strength 8
Open source inside 8
Plugin ready 9
Data visualization friendly 10
Installing R and writing R code 12
Downloading R 12
R installation for Windows and macOS 13
R installation for Linux OS 14
Main components of a base R installation 14
Possible alternatives to write and run R code 15
RStudio (all OSs) 16
The Jupyter Notebook (all OSs) 18
Visual Studio (Windows users only) 18
R foundational notions 19
A preliminary R session 20
Executing R interactively through the R console 21
Creating an R script 22
Executing an R script 23
Vectors 24
Lists 26
Creating lists 26
Subsetting lists 27
Data frames 27
Functions 29
R's weaknesses and how to overcome them 31
Learning R effectively and minimizing the effort 33
The tidyverse 34
Leveraging the R community to learn R 34
Where to find the R community 35
Engaging with the community to learn R 35
Handling large datasets with R 37
Further references 38
Table of Contents

Summary 38
Chapter 2: A First Primer on Data Mining Analysing Your Bank Account
Data 39
Acquiring and preparing your banking data 40
Data model 40
Summarizing your data with pivot-like tables 41
A gentle introduction to the pipe operator 43
An even more gentle introduction to the dplyr package 45
Installing the necessary packages and loading your data into R 45
Installing and loading the necessary packages 46
Importing your data into R 46
Defining the monthly and daily sum of expenses 47
Visualizing your data with ggplot2 51
Basic data visualization principles 51
Less but better 52
Not every chart is good for your message 54
Scatter plot 54
Line chart 55
Bar plot 55
Other advanced charts 56
Colors have to be chosen carefully 57
A bit of theory - chromatic circle, hue, and luminosity 57
Visualizing your data with ggplot 60
One more gentle introduction – the grammar of graphics 61
A layered grammar of graphics – ggplot2 61
Visualizing your banking movements with ggplot2 62
Visualizing the number of movements per day of the week 62
Further references 66
Summary 66
Chapter 3: The Data Mining Process - CRISP-DM Methodology 68
The Crisp-DM methodology data mining cycle 69
Business understanding 71
Data understanding 71
Data collection 71
How to perform data collection with R 72
Data import from TXT and CSV files 72
Data import from different types of format already structured as tables 72
Data import from unstructured sources 72
Data description 73
How to perform data description with R 73
Data exploration 73
What to use in R to perform this task 74

[ ii ]
Table of Contents

The summary() function 74

Box plot 75
Histograms 77
Data preparation 78
Modelling 79
Defining a data modeling strategy 79
How similar problems were solved in the past 80
Emerging techniques 80
Classification of modeling problems 80
How to perform data modeling with R 81
Evaluation 81
Clustering evaluation 81
Classification evaluation 82
Regression evaluation 83
How to judge the adequacy of a model's performance 84
What to use in R to perform this task 85
Deployment 85
Deployment plan development 86
Maintenance plan development 86
Summary 88
Chapter 4: Keeping the House Clean – The Data Mining Architecture 89
A general overview 90
Data sources 91
Types of data sources 92
Unstructured data sources 93
Structured data sources 93
Key issues of data sources 94
Databases and data warehouses 94
The third wheel – the data mart 95
One-level database 96
Two-level database 96
Three-level database 97
Technologies 97
SQL 98
MongoDB 98
Hadoop 99
The data mining engine 99
The interpreter 100
The interface between the engine and the data warehouse 100
The data mining algorithms 101
User interface 102

[ iii ]
Table of Contents

Clarity 102
Clarity and mystery 103
Clarity and simplicity 103
Efficiency 103
Consistency 104
Syntax highlight 105
Auto-completion 106
How to build a data mining architecture in R 107
Data sources 107
The data warehouse 108
The data mining engine 108
The interface between the engine and the data warehouse 109
The data mining algorithms 109
The user interface 109
Further references 110
Summary 111
Chapter 5: How to Address a Data Mining Problem – Data Cleaning and
Validation 112
On a quiet day 113
Data cleaning 115
Tidy data 115
Analysing the structure of our data 117
The str function 117
The describe function 118
head, tail, and View functions 119
Evaluating your data tidiness 121
Every row is a record 121
Every column shows an attribute 122
Every table represents an observational unit 123
Tidying our data 124
The tidyr package 124
Long versus wide data 124
The spread function 127
The gather function 128
The separate function 129
Applying tidyr to our dataset 130
Validating our data 132
Fitness for use 132
Conformance to standards 133
Data quality controls 133
Consistency checks 134
Data type checks 134
Logical checks 134
Domain checks 135

[ iv ]
Table of Contents

Uniqueness checks 135

Performing data validation on our data 135
Data type checks with str() 135
Domain checks 138
The final touch — data merging 143
left_join function 144
moving beyond left_join 146
Further references 146
Summary 147
Chapter 6: Looking into Your Data Eyes – Exploratory Data Analysis 148
Introducing summary EDA 149
Describing the population distribution 149
Quartiles and Median 149
Mean 151
The mean and phenomenon going on within sub populations 152
The mean being biased by outlier values 154
Computing the mean of our population 155
Variance 155
Standard deviation 156
Skewness 157
Measuring the relationship between variables 160
Correlation 161
The Pearson correlation coefficient 162
Distance correlation 167
Weaknesses of summary EDA - the Anscombe quartet 168
Graphical EDA 169
Visualizing a variable distribution 169
Histogram 170
Reporting date histogram 170
Geographical area histogram 171
Cash flow histogram 171
Boxplot 173
Checking for outliers 174
Visualizing relationships between variables 176
Scatterplots 176
Adding title, subtitle, and caption to the plot 178
Setting axis and legend 179
Adding explicative text to the plot 180
Final touches on colors 181
Further references 182
Summary 182
Chapter 7: Our First Guess – a Linear Regression 184
Defining a data modelling strategy 185
Data modelling notions 190

[v]
Table of Contents

Supervised learning 190

Unsupervised learning 191
The modeling strategy 191
Applying linear regression to our data 192
The intuition behind linear regression 192
The math behind the linear regression 194
Ordinary least squares technique 195
Model requirements – what to look for before applying the model 196
Residuals' uncorrelation 196
Residuals' homoscedasticity 197
How to apply linear regression in R 197
Fitting the linear regression model 198
Validating model assumption 198
Visualizing fitted values 200
Preparing the data for visualization 204
Developing the data visualization 205
Further references 207
Summary 207
Chapter 8: A Gentle Introduction to Model Performance Evaluation 209
Defining model performance 210
Fitting versus interpretability 210
Making predictions with models 212
Measuring performance in regression models 214
Mean squared error 215
R-squared 220
R-squared meaning and interpretation 222
R-squared computation in R 223
Adjusted R-squared 224
R-squared misconceptions 224
The R-squared doesn't measure the goodness of fit 224
A low R-squared doesn't mean your model is not statistically significant 226
Measuring the performance in classification problems 227
The confusion matrix 228
Confusion matrix in R 229
Accuracy 231
How to compute accuracy in R 231
Sensitivity 233
How to compute sensitivity in R 233
Specificity 233
How to compute specificity in R 234
How to choose the right performance statistics 234
A final general warning – training versus test datasets 235
Further references 236

[ vi ]
Table of Contents

Summary 236
Chapter 9: Don't Give up – Power up Your Regression Including
Multiple Variables 238
Moving from simple to multiple linear regression 239
Notation 239
Assumptions 239
Variables' collinearity 240
Tolerance 241
Variance inflation factors 243
Addressing collinearity 243
Dimensionality reduction 243
Stepwise regression 244
Backward stepwise regression 245
From the full model to the n-1 model 246
Forward stepwise regression 248
Double direction stepwise regression 248
Principal component regression 249
Fitting a multiple linear model with R 251
Model fitting 251
Variable assumptions validation 254
Residual assumptions validation 256
Dimensionality reduction 257
Principal component regression 257
Stepwise regression 260
Linear model cheat sheet 265
Further references 266
Summary 266
Chapter 10: A Different Outlook to Problems with Classification Models 267
What is classification and why do we need it? 268
Linear regression limitations for categorical variables 268
Common classification algorithms and models 270
Logistic regression 272
The intuition behind logistic regression 272
The logistic function estimates a response variable enclosed within an upper and
lower bound 273
The logistic function estimates the probability of an observation pertaining to one of
the two available categories 274
The math behind logistic regression 274
Maximum likelihood estimator 276
Model assumptions 277
Absence of multicollinearity between variables 277
Linear relationship between explanatory variables and log odds 278

[ vii ]
Table of Contents

Large enough sample size 279

How to apply logistic regression in R 279
Fitting the model 281
Reading the glm() estimation output 281
The level of statistical significance of the association between the explanatory
variable and the response variable 282
The AIC performance metric 284
Validating model assumptions 285
Fitting quadratic and cubic models to test for linearity of log odds 285
Visualizing and interpreting logistic regression results 287
Visualizing results 287
Interpreting results 290
Logistic regression cheat sheet 292
Support vector machines 292
The intuition behind support vector machines 293
The hyperplane 293
Maximal margin classifier 296
Support vector and support vector machines 296
Model assumptions 297
Independent and identically distributed random variables 297
Independent variables 298
Identically distributed 298
Applying support vector machines in R 301
The svm() function 301
Applying the svm function to our data 302
Interpreting support vector machine results 303
Understanding the meaning of hyperplane weights 303
Support Vector Machine cheat sheet 305
References 306
Summary 306
Chapter 11: The Final Clash – Random Forests and Ensemble Learning 308
Random forest 309
Random forest building blocks – decision trees introduction 309
The intuition behind random forests 313
How to apply random forests in R 314
Evaluating the results of the model 315
Performance of the model 316
OOB estimate error rate 316
Confusion matrix 318
Importance of predictors 319
Mean decrease in accuracy 319
Gini index 319
Plotting relative importance of predictors 320
Random forest cheat sheet 321

[ viii ]
Table of Contents

Ensemble learning 322

Basic ensemble learning techniques 322
Applying ensemble learning to our data in R 323
The R caret package 323
Computing a confusion matrix with the caret package 324
Interpreting confusion matrix results 327
Applying a weighted majority vote to our data 329
Applying estimated models on new data 331
predict.glm() for prediction from the logistic model 333
predict.randomForest() for prediction from random forests 333
predict.svm() for prediction from support vector machines 333
A more structured approach to predictive analytics 334
Applying the majority vote ensemble technique on predicted data 335
Further references 337
Summary 337
Chapter 12: Looking for the Culprit – Text Data Mining with R 339
Extracting data from a PDF file in R 340
Getting a list of documents in a folder 341
Reading PDF files into R via pdf_text() 342
Iteratively extracting text from a set of documents with a for loop 343
Sentiment analysis 348
Developing wordclouds from text 351
Looking for context in text – analyzing document n-grams 353
Performing network analysis on textual data 355
Obtaining an hedge list from a data frame 359
Visualizing a network with the ggraph package 360
Tuning the appearance of nodes and edges 362
Computing the degree parameter in a network to highlight relevant nodes 363
Further references 365
Summary 365
Chapter 13: Sharing Your Stories with Your Stakeholders through R
Markdown 366
Principles of a good data mining report 366
Clearly state the objectives 367
Clearly state assumptions 367
Make the data treatments clear 368
Show consistent data 368
Provide data lineage 369
Set up an rmarkdown report 369

[ ix ]
Table of Contents

Develop an R markdown report in RStudio 372

A brief introduction to markdown 372
Inserting a chunk of code 374
How to show readable tables in rmarkdwon reports 376
Reproducing R code output within text through inline code 377
Introduction to Shiny and the reactivity framework 378
Employing input and output to deal with changes in Shiny app parameters 379
Adding an interactive data lineage module 383
Adding an input panel to an R markdown report 384
Adding a data table to your report 385
Expanding Shiny beyond the basics 387
Rendering and sharing an R markdown report 387
Rendering an R markdown report 387
Sharing an R Markdown report 389
Render a static markdown report into different file formats 390
Render interactive Shiny apps on dedicated servers 390
Sharing a Shiny app through shinyapps.io 391
Further references 392
Summary 392
Chapter 14: Epilogue 393
Chapter 15: Dealing with Dates, Relative Paths and Functions 397
Dealing with dates in R 397
Working directories and relative paths in R 397
Conditional statements 399
Index 400

[x]
 Preface
You have probably heard that R is a fabulous tool that is gaining in popularity everyday
among data analysts and data scientists, and that it is renowned for its ability to deliver
highly flexible and professional results, paired with astonishing data visualizations. All this
sounds great, but how can you learn to use R as a data mining tool? This book will guide
you from the very beginning of this journey; you will not need to bring anything with you
except your curiosity, since we will discover everything we need along the way.

The book will help you develop these powerful skills through immersion in a crime case
that requires the use of data mining skills to solve, where you will be asked to help resolve a
real fraud case affecting a commercial company using both basic and advanced data mining
techniques.

At the end of our trip into the R world, you will be able to identify data mining problems,
analyze them, and correctly address them with the main data mining techniques (and some
advanced ones), producing astonishing final reports to convey messages and narrate the
stories you found within your data.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Why to Choose R for Your Data Mining and Where to Start, gives you some relevant
facts about R's history, its main strengths and weaknesses, and how to install the language
on your computer and write basic code.

Chapter 2, A First Primer on Data Mining -Analyzing Your Bank Account Data, applies R to
our data.

Chapter 3, The Data Mining Process - the CRISP-DM Methodology, teaches you to organize
and conduct a data mining project through the CRISP-DM methodology.

Chapter 4, Keeping the Home Clean – The Data Mining Architecture, defines the static part of
our data mining projects, the data mining architecture.

Chapter 5, How to Address a Data Mining Problem – Data Cleaning and Validation, covers data
quality and data validation, where you will find out which metrics define the level of
quality of our data and discover a set of checks that can be employed to assess this quality.
Preface

Chapter 6, Looking into Your Data Eyes – Exploratory Data Analysis, teaches you about the
concept of exploratory data analysis and how it can be included within the data analysis
process.

Chapter 7, Our First Guess – A Linear Regression, lets us estimate a simple linear regression
model and check whether its assumptions have been satisfied.

Chapter 8, A Gentle Introduction to Model Performance Evaluation, covers the tools used to
define and measure the performance of data mining models.

Chapter 9, Don't Give Up – Power Up Your Regression Including Multiple Variables, predicts
the output of our response variable when more than one exploratory variable is involved.

Chapter 10, A Different Outlook to Problems with Classification Models, looks into classification
models, the need of them and they are uses.

Chapter 11, The Final Clash – Random Forest and Ensemble Learning, in this chapter we will
learn how to apply ensemble learning to estimated classification models.

Chapter 12, Looking for the Culprit – Text Data Mining with R, shows how to prepare the data
frame for text mining activities, removing irrelevant words and transforming it from a list
of sentences to a list of words. You also learn to perform sentiment analyses, wordcloud
development, and n-gram analyses on it.

Chapter 13, Sharing Your Stories with Your Stakeholders through R Markdown, employs R
markdown and shiny, two powerful instruments made available within the RStudio
ecosystem.

Chapter 14, Epilogue, is the unique background story made to learn the topics in a very
engaging manner.

Appendix, Dealing with Dates, Relative Paths, and Functions, includes additional information
to get things running in R.

What you need for this book

You will easily be able to sail through the chapters by employing R and UNIX or Windows.
The version used is R 3.4.0.

[2]
Preface

Who this book is for

If you are a budding data scientist or a data analyst with basic knowledge of R, and you
want to get into the intricacies of data mining in a practical manner, this is the book for you.
No previous experience of data mining is required.

Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds
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Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, path
names, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Finally,
ggplot2 gives you the ability to highly customize your plot, adding every kind of graphical
or textual annotation to it."

A block of code is set as follows:

install.packages("ggplot2")
library(ggplot2)

New terms and important words are shown in bold.

Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text
like this: "In order to download new modules, we will go to Files | Settings | Project Name
| Project Interpreter."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

[3]
Preface

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[5]
 Why to Choose R for Your Data
1
Mining and Where to Start
Since this is our first step on the journey to R knowledge, we have to be sure to acquire all
the tools and notions we will use on our trip. You are probably already an R enthusiast and
would like to discover more about it, but maybe you are not so sure why you should invest
time in learning it. Perhaps you lack confidence in defining its points of strength and
weakness, and therefore you are not sure it is the right language to bet on. Crucially, you do
not actually know where and how to practically begin your journey to R mastery. The good
news, is you will not have to wait long to solve all of these issues, since this first chapter is
all about them.

In particular, within this chapter we will:

Look at the history of R to understand where everything came from

Analyze R's points of strength, understanding why it is a savvy idea to learn this
programming language
Learn how to install the R language on your computer and how to write and run
R code
Gain an understanding of the R language and the foundation notions needed to
start writing R scripts
Understand R's points of weakness and how to work around them

By the end of the chapter, we will have all the weapons needed to face our first real data
mining problem.
Why to Choose R for Your Data Mining and Where to Start Chapter 1

What is R?
Let's start from the very beginning, What exactly is R? You will have read a lot about it on
data analysis and data science blogs and websites, but perhaps you are still not able to fix
the concept in your mind. R is a high-level programming language. This means that by
passing the kind of R scripts you are going to learn in this book, you will be able to order
your PC to execute some desired computations and operations, resulting in some
predefined output.

Programming languages are a set of predefined instructions that the computer is able to
understand and react to, and R is one of them. You may have noticed that I referred to R as
a high-level programming language. What does high-level mean? One way to understand it
is by comparing it to typical industrial company structures. Within such companies, there is
usually a CEO, senior managers, heads of departments, and so on, level by level until we
reach the final group of workers.

What is the difference between those levels of a company hierarchy? The CEO makes the main
strategical decisions, developing a strategical plan without taking care of tactical and
operational details. From there, the lower you go in the hierarchy described, the more
tactical and operational decisions become, until you reach the base worker, whose main
duty is to execute basic operations, such as screwing and hammering.

It is the same for programming languages:

High-level programming languages are like the CEO; they abstract from
operational details, stating high-level sentences which will then be translated by
lower-level languages the computer is able to understand
Low-level programming languages are like the heads of departments and
workers; they take sentences from higher-level languages and translate them into
chunks of instructions needed to make the computer actually produce the output
the CEO is looking for

To be precise, we should specify that it is also possible to directly write code using low-level
programming languages. Nevertheless, since they tend to be more complex and wordy,
their popularity has declined over time.

Now that we have a clear idea of what R is, let's move on and acquire a bit of knowledge
about where R came from and when.

[7]
Why to Choose R for Your Data Mining and Where to Start Chapter 1

A bit of history
When Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman published R: A Language for Data Analysis and
Graphics in 1996, they probably didn't imagine the success the language would achieve
between then and now. R was born at the University of Auckland in the early 1990s. In the
beginning, it was supposed to be a user-friendly data analysis tool, employed by students to
perform their research activities. Nevertheless, the points of strength we will look at in the
following paragraphs quickly made it very popular among the wider community of
researchers and data analysts, finally reaching the business realm in recent years and being
used within major financial institutions.

R language development is currently led by the R core team, which releases updates of the
base R language on a regular basis. You can discover more about the bureaucratic side of R
by visiting the official R website at https:/​/​www.​r-​project.​org/​about.​html.

R's points of strength

You know that R is really popular, but why? R is not the only data analysis language out
there, and neither is it the oldest one; so why is it so popular?

If looking at the root causes of R's popularity, we definitely have to mention these three:

Open source inside

Plugin ready
Data visualization friendly

Open source inside

One of the main reasons the adoption of R is spreading is its open source nature. R binary
code is available for everyone to download, modify, and share back again (only in an open
source way). Technically, R is released with a GNU general public license, meaning that you
can take it and use it for whatever purpose; but you have to share every derivative with a
GNU general public license as well.

[8]
Why to Choose R for Your Data Mining and Where to Start Chapter 1

These attributes fit well for almost every target user of a statistical analysis language:

Academic user: Knowledge sharing is a must for an academic environment, and

having the ability to share work without the worry of copyright and license
questions makes R very practical for academic research purposes
Business user: Companies are always worried about budget constraints; having
professional statistical analysis software at their disposal for free sounds like a
dream come true
Private user: This user merges together both of the benefits already mentioned,
because they will find it great to have a free instrument with which to learn and
share their own statistical analyses

Plugin ready
You could imagine the R language as an expandable board game. You know, games like 7
Wonders or Carcassonne, with a base set of characters and places and further optional places
and characters, increasing the choices at your disposal and maximizing the fun. The R
language can be compared to this kind of game.

There is a base version of R, containing a group of default packages that are delivered along
with the standard version of the software (you can skip to the Installing R and writing R code
section for more on how to obtain and install it). The functionalities available through the
base version are mainly related to filesystem manipulation, statistical analysis, and data
visualization.

While this base version is regularly maintained and updated by the R core team, virtually
every R user can add further new functionalities to those available within the package,
developing and sharing custom packages.

This is basically how the package development and sharing flow works:

1. The R user develops a new package, for example a package introducing a new
machine learning algorithm exposed within a freshly published academic paper.
2. The user submits the package to the CRAN repository or a similar repository.
The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) is the official repository for R-
related documents and packages.

[9]
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