Part IV

Making the Data Talk

In this part . . .

R has earned its status as one of the leading statistical packages for a reason. Statisticians use it to extract meaningful relationships from sometimes gigabytes of available data in a variety of ways. For them, R is often the right tool to convert a bunch of numbers into an interesting story.

In this part, you meet a small selection of tools that allow you to tell the story of your data. You get to subset, combine, and restructure your data; summarize it in meaningful ways; and use the power of statistics to test your hypotheses on the data at hand.

Because thousands of people continue to develop new statistical techniques and write new R packages, this section covers only a tiny spectrum of possible analyses. But you do get insight into how you formulate tests and what you can do with the resulting objects.