Managing data with R

One of the challenges faced while working with massive datasets involves gathering, preparing, and otherwise managing data from a variety of sources. Although we will cover data preparation, data cleaning, and data management in depth by working on real-world machine learning tasks in the later chapters, this section will highlight the basic functionality to get data into and out of R.

Saving, loading, and removing R data structures

When you have spent a lot of time getting a data frame into the desired form, you shouldn't need to recreate your work each time you restart your R session. To save a data structure to a file that can be reloaded later or transferred to another system, use the save() function. The save() function writes one or more R data structures to the location specified by the file parameter. R data files have an .RData extension.

Suppose you have three objects named x, y, and z that you would like to save in a permanent file. Regardless of whether...