R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Creating standard data summaries

In this recipe we summarize the data using the summary function.

Getting ready

If you have not already downloaded the files for this chapter, do it now and ensure that the auto-mpg.csv file is in your R working directory.

How to do it...

Read the data from auto-mpg.csv, which includes a header row and columns separated by the default "," symbol.

1. Read the data from auto-mpg.csv and convert cylinders to factor:

   > auto  <- read.csv("auto-mpg.csv", header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
   > # Convert cylinders to factor
   > auto$cylinders <- factor(auto$cylinders, levels = c(3,4,5,6,8), labels = c("3cyl", "4cyl", "5cyl", "6cyl", "8cyl"))

2. Get the summary statistics:

   summary(auto) No mpg cylinders displacement Min. : 1.0 Min. : ...