Data Input

Assign Values to Variables [source]

• assigned with <- or ->
• = is also possible but discouraged [example]
• case sensitive, aa != AA != aA != Aa

a1<-7

a2<-"andre agassi"

b1<-c(1,2,3,4,5,6)

b2<-1:10

b3<-c("andre","agassi","was","the","best","tennis","player","ever")

b1[5] 			// fifth element
b2[1:7] 		// element 1..7
c(b3[1:2],b3[4:8])	// element 1 and 2 as well as 4..8
b3[-3] 			// same

aa1<-rep(4,23)
aa2<-c(1,2,3,rep(4,23),5,6,7)
aa3<-rep(c("small","large","small","large"),c(6,6,6,6))
aa4<-rep(c("small","large"),each=1,length.out=24)

aa5<-seq(from=1,to=10,by=2)
aa6<-seq(from=1,to=10,length.out=100)

aa7<-sample(1:10)
aa8<-sample(1:10,30,replace=T)

aa9<-rnorm(10,mean=5,sd=1)
aa10<-runif(10,min=0,max=1)
aa11<-.Random.seed[1:10]

• a matrix is 2 dimensional [nrow:ncol]
• all elements are of the same same data type
• use data frames for different data types (same type per column)
• use tables for higher dimension arrays

c1<-matrix(1:10,nrow=2)
c2<-matrix(1:10,ncol=2)
c3<-matrix(1:10,nrow=2,byrow=TRUE) // byrow - boolean, default=F(ALSE)
c4<-matrix(1:10,ncol=2,byrow=T)

c1[1,5]
c1[1,]
c1[,2]
c1[1,2:4]

Read Data from Files

• text files rule! [source]
• separater usually tab, comma, semicolon
• use scan() for large files (and you only want a portion of it)
• read.table() reads data as table and converts it to data frame
• read.csv() is basically the same

mydata1<-read.table("input1.dat",sep="\t",header=F)

• column names possible [source]
• addressable by var$colname

mydata2<-read.table("input2.dat",sep="\t",header=T)
mydata2$id
mydata2$val_A
mydata2$val_B

NA Values

d1<-c(1:3,rep(NA,4),8:10)
mean(d1)

mean(d1,na.rm=T)
median(d1,na.rm=T)

Get Data from Database

• make sure you have the proper module installed and loaded
• this example uses a MySQL server on mln-web.cs.odu.edu [source]

library(RMySQL)
mydbcon<-dbConnect(MySQL(), user, password, dbname, host)
mydbdata<-dbGetQuery(mydbcon, "SELECT * FROM table")
dbDisconnect(mydbcon)