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Why Consider R for Data Science [A Guide]

May 13, 2023
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In today's digital age, every organization relies on useful insights gleaned from Big Data. Enterprises can offer superior customized solutions by leveraging Data Science to keep changing customer requirements. As more businesses join the Data Science crusade, the need for Data Analysis Programming Languages and complicated Statistical Software grows. As a result, Programming Languages such as R for Data Science, Python, and others have increased. R is one of the most popular programming languages in the world for data science, according to TIOBE's index and IEEE Spectrum.[lwptoc min="2" skipHeadingLevel="h1,h4,h5,h6"]This article gives an in-depth examination of R's utility in Data Science and how it may benefit every Data Scientist. It discusses R's distinctive characteristics in Data Science and some of the most popular R packages. Additionally, it discusses the advantages of R over Python for Data Science.

R: An Introduction

R was designed at the University of Auckland by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. It is a dialect of another language known as "S." The R Core Group maintains the open-source Programming Language under the GNU GPL v2 license.R is a Procedural Programming Language that divides tasks into Stages, Processes, and Subroutines. This enables R to readily transform data into relevant statistics, graphs, and predictive and inferential statistical learning models. Organizations can prioritize outstanding reporting and clear visuals when using R in Data Science and develop Interactive Web Applications for reports via Packages.R in Data Science includes several open-source Data Operation Packages and tools for analyzing complicated Statistical Models. Data Scientists can use R in Data Science to perform Data Analysis quickly and easily without having to write multiple algorithms from scratch. This enables Data Scientists to modify, transform rapidly, and clean Data Structures for specific use-cases. For example, it has Libraries for Econometrics, Finance, and other fields to help organizations simplify their Data Science workflows.

R's Features

R is an extremely capable programming language, and there are several reasons you should learn R for Data Science. The following are a few of these features briefly explained:

'Open Source'

Since the source code and libraries are open-source, anyone can access, modify, and share them without restriction.

Best-in-Class Visualizations

Libraries such as ggplot2, plotly, dplyr, and tidyr provide some of the most aesthetically pleasing yet useful data visualizations available.

Extension Support

The project's open-source nature enables updates to existing libraries and even the construction of new ones to meet specific requirements. Nonetheless, R includes a sizable library collection.

Widespread Community Support

R includes a vibrant and inviting community for individuals of all skill levels, whereas boot camps and workshops promote cooperative behavior.

Simple to comprehend

If statistics is your thing, you'll have no trouble understanding and working with R, as it was built to make R programming for Data Science easier.

Why R for Data Science?

Simple Management with R Markdown and Shiny

One of the most compelling reasons to choose R over other data science programming languages is its ability to generate business-ready infographics, reports, and machine learning-powered web applications. RMARKDOWN and Shiny are two of the most important of these tools.RMARKDOWN is a framework for constructing reversible reports that may be used to create blogs, books, presentations, and webpages, among other things. Due to the tool's adaptability, it is employed by management companies of all sizes.

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Using R Markdown to create reports that assist their clients with business analysis, management firms are free to commercialize if they develop something new using the free and open-source program.Shiny is the outcome of merging the computational capabilities of R with the highly interactive nature of the modern web. It is a competent R-based tool for rapidly developing interactive web apps hosted as independent applications on a webpage or embedded in R Markdown texts.

R is intelligent and boasts a robust infrastructure.

R is a powerful infrastructure-based programming language that is also smart. It's essentially Excel for corporations, but with exponentially greater capabilities.R can implement several high-end algorithms, including the TensorFlow deep learning packages, the high-end machine learning package H20, and XGBoost, which implements the Gradient Boosted Decision Trees algorithm.The R programming language's Tidyverse module enables the development of an application ecosystem using a structured, consistent manner. R simplifies developing data science applications by including libraries such as forcats, lubridate, and stringr.

Using Tidyverse to Learn R is Becoming Increasingly Convenient

R has a well-known steep learning curve. It is, however, becoming less steep. During the early stages of R's development, it was considered one of the most difficult languages to learn. R lacked the structuring capabilities of its contemporaries at the time.That all changed with the introduction of Tidyverse by Hadley Wickham and his team. The term 'tidy' is used to refer to the underlying design philosophy, data structures, and grammar of tidy data shared among the various R packages.Tidyverse is an R package and tool collection that provides a consistent interface for structural programming in the R programming language. The introduction of Tidyverse simplified the process of learning complex curves using the statistical programming language.

Data Manipulation

The term "Data Science" refers to the process of collecting data, cleaning it, managing it, and obtaining valuable information from it using a variety of techniques and algorithms. A vital step in this procedure is ensuring that the data is in the correct format for processing. Data Wrangling is the sub-process responsible for acquiring the necessary data and converting it to a usable format.Fortunately, R includes various useful packages created to alter and enable efficient and consistent data consumption for analysis, significantly simplifying Data Science using R.dplyr, purrr, readxl, datapasta, jsonlite, and tidyr, to name a few, enable data exploration and transformation, while others aid in efficiently reading data from a variety of files formats.

Visualization of Data

Visualization of data is one of the primary takeaways from the R programming language, as it was designed specifically for this reason. Data visualization is a critical stage in the data analysis process, and R makes it nearly trivial.With visualization as its primary objective, R has various packages that accomplish this goal while also providing extensive analysis and representation capabilities. ggplot2, lattice, highcharter, leaflet, dygraphs, sunburstR, and RGL are just a handful of these packages.Another component of Data Visualization is the creation of reports from our findings, which requires the use of RMarkdown. By enabling the effortless creation of concise reports based on your data, RMarkdown converts intuitive charts and graphs into a more presentable document format that businesses and corporations prefer when combined with htmlwidgets, the shiny package, the flexdashboard package, or the bookdown package.

Conclusion

By 2020, R will be used by hobbyist programmers, data scientists, academics, statisticians, and students worldwide. R's popularity has exploded in recent years, owing largely to improvements in the fields of data analytics and data science.The five factors outlined above distinguish R from the competition regarding data science and business analytics. With the latest improvements added to its armoury and a community that is always growing, now is an excellent moment to begin studying the R programming language.It is possible to manage data science projects using the R programming language regardless of your programming background. However, knowledge with programming ideas will undoubtedly aid in the process of learning and progressing in R.

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