Getting a sense of your data structure with R

By following the recipes given in the previous chapter, you got your data. Everything went smoothly, and you may also already have the data as a data frame object.

However, do you know what your data looks like?

Getting to know your data structure is a crucial step within a data analysis project. It will suggest the appropriate treatment and analysis, and will help you avoid error and redundancy in the coding activity that follows.

In this recipe, we will look at a dataset structure by leveraging the describe() function from the Hmisc package. For further preliminary analysis on your data structure, you can also refer to the data visualization recipes in Chapter 3, Basic Visualization Techniques.

Getting ready

This example will be built around a dataset provided in the RStudio project related to this book.

You can download it by authenticating your account at http://packtpub.com.

This dataset is named world_gdp_data.csv and stores GDP values for 248...