Interfacing with R

RPy2 can only be used to call R from Python, and not the other way around. We will import some sample R datasets, and plot the data of one of them.

Getting ready

Install RPy2 if necessary. See the previous recipe.

How to do it...

Let's start by loading a sample R dataset.

1. Load a data set into an array.

   Load the datasets with the RPy2 importr function. This function can import R packages. In this example, we will import the datasets R package. Create a NumPy array from the mtcars dataset:

   datasets = importr('datasets')
   mtcars = numpy.array(datasets.mtcars)

2. Plot the dataset.

   Plot the dataset with Matplotlib:

   matplotlib.pyplot.plot(mtcars)
   matplotlib.pyplot.show()

   The following image shows the data, which is a two dimensional array:

   

The complete code for this recipe is as follows:

from rpy2.robjects.packages import importr
import numpy
import matplotlib.pyplot

datasets = importr('datasets')
mtcars = numpy.array(datasets.mtcars)

matplotlib.pyplot.plot(mtcars)
matplotlib.pyplot.show...