R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Working with univariate descriptive statistics in R

Univariate descriptive statistics describes a single variable for unit analysis, which is also the simplest form of quantitative analysis. In this recipe, we introduce some basic functions used to describe a single variable.

Getting ready

We need to apply descriptive statistics to a sample data. Here, we use the built-in mtcars data as our example.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps:

1. First, load the mtcars data into a data frame with a variable named mtcars:

   > data(mtcars)
   

2. To obtain the vector range, the range function will return the lower and upper bound of the vector:

   > range(mtcars$mpg)
   [1] 10.4 33.9
   

3. Compute the length of the variable:

   > length(mtcars$mpg)
   [1] 32
   

4. Obtain the mean of mpg: ...