R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Visualizing data

Visualization is a powerful way to communicate information through graphical means. Visual presentations make data easier to comprehend. This recipe presents some basic functions to plot charts, and demonstrates how visualizations are helpful in data exploration.

Getting ready

Ensure that you have completed the previous recipes by installing R on your operating system.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to visualize a dataset:

1. Load the iris data into the R session:

   > data(iris)
   

2. Calculate the frequency of species within the iris using the table command:

   > table.iris = table(iris$Species)
   > table.iris
   
       setosa versicolor  virginica 
           50         50         50 
   

3. As the frequency in the table shows, each species represents 1/3 of the iris data. We ...