If your data mining project is going to be performed with R, which we could infer from you reading this book, the data collection phase will essentially be performed by downloading your data from its original source, and importing it within the R environment.

This short description actually hides a great variety of activities, as well as a great variety of tools provided by the R community to perform them. We can briefly try to summarize them, as described in the paragraphs that follow. For a more general overview of how to establish connection to your data sources, you should look at Chapter 4, Keeping the Home Clean – The Data Mining Architecture, within the Data sources section.