# COMM 550-Lab Three: Data Management and Cleaning

#### Back

'Welcome to the Lab Three tutorial! In this guide we'll be covering how to clean 'and examine your dataset as well as compute new variables off of old ones. We'll be using the following packages for this exercise, if you do not already have them installed use the install.packages('') function to load them up.

install.packages('car')
install.packages('VIM')

library(car)
library(ggplot2)
library(VIM)


In this guide we'll be covering how to clean and examine your dataset as well as compute new variables off of old ones. We will be working with some values generated through random processes, so first we need to set a random number seed, this is the value which R takes as the starting point for random number generation, if everyone has the same seed then we'll all get the same random values. Set the seed

set.seed(11)


Generate one random value between 5 and 10

runif(1, 5.0, 10)

## [1] 6.386


Cool, we all should have the same number! Okay, let's read our data from the working directory.

mms<-read.csv(url('http://joshaclark.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/mms.csv'))


And take a look at it.

head(mms)

##   id brown red yellow blue green orange
## 1  1     8   2      7    2     2      2
## 2  2     4   4      5    4     2      4
## 3  3     6   3      5    1     4      3
## 4  4     7   2      9    1     2      2
## 5  5     8   0      7    3     3      4
## 6  6    10   3      4    1     1      2


The mms in this case represents my observations of what colors where in the packages of M&M's I've eaten over the past few years. Each row represents one pack of candy and each col. is the number of that color within the package. Now I like the red yellow and orange candies the best, so let's create a new variable called goodcol which is the total number of “good” candies in each package. To do that we write mms$NEWVARIABLENAME and assign some series of totals to it, in this case the sum of all the good M&M's in the package. (Data drawn from the Math Dept. of the University of Alabama-Huntsville) mms$goodcol<-mms$red+mms$yellow+mms$orange summary(mms$goodcol)

##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's
##       3      11      12      12      13      22      12


Now let's sum all of the bad colors.

mms$badcol<-mms$brown+mms$green+mms$blue
summary(mms$badcol)  ## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's ## 8.0 11.0 12.5 12.6 14.0 18.0 8  In order to statistically optimize my candy eating experience I want to see the percentage of each package which I've eaten is made up of good colors and bad colors. Notice that I can pass variables instead of numbers and R will automatically compute each row. mms$pergood<-mms$goodcol/(mms$goodcol+mms$badcol)  We can calculate the % of bad candies in two ways, once again notice the mix of numbers and objects in the syntax. mms$perbad<-mms$badcol/(mms$goodcol+mms$badcol)  OR mms$perbad<-1-mms$pergood  We can also use R to transform variables. In this case we'll use various transformations to coerce the variable “brown” into different distributions. qplot(mms$brown, geom="histogram")

## stat_bin: binwidth defaulted to range/30. Use 'binwidth = x' to adjust this.


qplot(sqrt(mms$brown), geom="histogram")  ## stat_bin: binwidth defaulted to range/30. Use 'binwidth = x' to adjust this.  qplot(log(mms$brown), geom="histogram")

## stat_bin: binwidth defaulted to range/30. Use 'binwidth = x' to adjust this.


qplot(exp(mms$brown), geom="histogram")  ## stat_bin: binwidth defaulted to range/30. Use 'binwidth = x' to adjust this.  qplot(mms$brown^2,geom="histogram")

## stat_bin: binwidth defaulted to range/30. Use 'binwidth = x' to adjust this.


mms$brown.trans<-sqrt(mms$brown)


Let's try 'binning' the data, that is aggregating an interval variable into an ordinal or nominal variables. Be CAREFUL when binning your data. It can be useful but at the same time you are losing variance in your measurements. There is a lot less specificity in have five groups of people based on their age as opposed to simply entering how old they are. In this case we are going to group our count of good candies into two bins, “lots” and “few” based on if they are above or below the median of the data. First let's find the median using the summary function.

summary(mms$goodcol)  ## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's ## 3 11 12 12 13 22 12  Then let's bin the data into our two groups using the cut function. First we'll create a new variable called “candybin” then use the function cut and provide the variable we are cutting (in this case goodcol). Next we'll define breaks and use the c() functionality to provide a list of numbers which will serve as the points where where R makes the cuts. So if we provide three numbers, x,y and z then R will create two bins, between x and y and between y and z. Finally we can provide labels just like when we named our variables in the last section. The first label will go on the first bin the second on the second bin etc etc. mms$candybin<-cut(mms$goodcol, breaks=c(0,11,18), labels=c('few', 'lots')) head(mms)  ## id brown red yellow blue green orange goodcol badcol pergood perbad ## 1 1 8 2 7 2 2 2 11 12 0.4783 0.5217 ## 2 2 4 4 5 4 2 4 13 10 0.5652 0.4348 ## 3 3 6 3 5 1 4 3 11 11 0.5000 0.5000 ## 4 4 7 2 9 1 2 2 13 10 0.5652 0.4348 ## 5 5 8 0 7 3 3 4 11 14 0.4400 0.5600 ## 6 6 10 3 4 1 1 2 9 12 0.4286 0.5714 ## brown.trans candybin ## 1 2.828 few ## 2 2.000 lots ## 3 2.449 few ## 4 2.646 lots ## 5 2.828 few ## 6 3.162 few  summary(mms$candybin)

##  few lots NA's
##   34   35   15


You will notice that we have a lot of NAs in the dataset. This is because I got hungry at ate some of the candy before counting it. There are a few strategies for dealing with this problem. One is simply to delete the cases with missing data (listwise deletion). This can be carried out using the na.omit function. Make a new object so you don't overwrite your data.

trimmms<-na.omit(mms)

##   id brown red yellow blue green orange goodcol badcol pergood perbad
## 1  1     8   2      7    2     2      2      11     12  0.4783 0.5217
## 2  2     4   4      5    4     2      4      13     10  0.5652 0.4348
## 3  3     6   3      5    1     4      3      11     11  0.5000 0.5000
## 4  4     7   2      9    1     2      2      13     10  0.5652 0.4348
## 5  5     8   0      7    3     3      4      11     14  0.4400 0.5600
## 6  6    10   3      4    1     1      2       9     12  0.4286 0.5714
##   brown.trans candybin
## 1       2.828      few
## 2       2.000     lots
## 3       2.449      few
## 4       2.646     lots
## 5       2.828      few
## 6       3.162      few


Oh dear, we lost a number of cases via deletion, which reduces our sample size fortunately there are other options for dealing with missing data. As an example we can use 'hot deck' imputation. This method looks through your dataset for cases with missing values and then finds other cases which have similar values. From this “deck” of cases it will randomly draw a value and replace the missing information with this score. This method will create quite a few extra variables

hotmms<-hotdeck(mms)

##   id brown red yellow blue green orange goodcol badcol pergood perbad
## 1  1     8   2      7    2     2      2      11     12  0.4783 0.5217
## 2  2     4   4      5    4     2      4      13     10  0.5652 0.4348
## 3  3     6   3      5    1     4      3      11     11  0.5000 0.5000
## 4  4     7   2      9    1     2      2      13     10  0.5652 0.4348
## 5  5     8   0      7    3     3      4      11     14  0.4400 0.5600
## 6  6    10   3      4    1     1      2       9     12  0.4286 0.5714
##   brown.trans candybin brown_imp red_imp yellow_imp blue_imp green_imp
## 1       2.828      few     FALSE   FALSE      FALSE    FALSE     FALSE
## 2       2.000     lots     FALSE   FALSE      FALSE    FALSE     FALSE
## 3       2.449      few     FALSE   FALSE      FALSE    FALSE     FALSE
## 4       2.646     lots     FALSE   FALSE      FALSE    FALSE     FALSE
## 5       2.828      few     FALSE   FALSE      FALSE    FALSE     FALSE
## 6       3.162      few     FALSE   FALSE      FALSE    FALSE     FALSE
## 1      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE           FALSE
## 2      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE           FALSE
## 3      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE           FALSE
## 4      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE           FALSE
## 5      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE           FALSE
## 6      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE       FALSE      FALSE           FALSE
##   candybin_imp
## 1        FALSE
## 2        FALSE
## 3        FALSE
## 4        FALSE
## 5        FALSE
## 6        FALSE


Wow, what a mess, Hotdeck has created boolean variables (true/false) for each case, telling us what data has been changed as well as new variables. Often we will not want to impute every bit of data so we can perform the same operation on a single variable instead. Let's look at what hotdeck creates when it only has to deal with one variable

hotstuff<-hotdeck(mms$red) head(hotstuff)  ## data data_imp ## 1 2 FALSE ## 2 4 FALSE ## 3 3 FALSE ## 4 2 FALSE ## 5 0 FALSE ## 6 3 FALSE  We have to columns created by the process, if we only want to add the values to our dataset we can do so by just placing a$data after the command just like any other column.

mms$red.hot<-hotdeck(mms$red)$data summary(mms$red)

##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's
##     0.0     3.0     4.0     3.9     5.0    10.0       2


Finally let's look for outliers among our data. We can do this with a box and whisker plot. The middle black line is the median (4) while the solid box around it shows the first and third quartile. The whiskers (thin lines leading out) show the maximum and minimum without outliers. Outliers are those values which are 1.5 times the inter-quartile range (the difference between the third and first quartile) away from first quartile (for lower then expected scores) or third (for higher than expected scores). Let's do the math first then our box plots. We can get all the information about quartiles by looking at the summary(mms$red.hot) command we just passed. So the inter-quartile range is: 5-3  ## [1] 2  Which we can multiply by 1.5 to get ol<-(5-3)*1.5  So upper outliers are anything beyond 5+ol  ## [1] 8  And lower 3-ol  ## [1] 0  Since we can't have less than zero candies we only have to worry about higher outliers (i.e. those greater then 8) Let's take a look at our boxplot boxplot(mms$red.hot)


Two upper outliers we can extract them by placing the $out command behind the boxplot function outliers<-boxplot(mms$red.hot)$out  outliers  ## [1] 9 10  We have two outliers, 9 and 10, both >8. There are a variety of ways to deal with them 1-Replace with the nearest non-outlier value (8). We use if-else logic for this. The first statement says if the value is greater than 8, replace with 8, otherwise keep it with the original value. mms$red.hot.clean <- ifelse(mms$red.hot>8, 8, mms$red.hot)
summary(mms$red.hot.clean)  ## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. ## 0.00 3.00 4.00 3.85 5.00 8.00  table(mms$red.hot)

##
##  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10
##  3  9  8 18 18 12  7  2  5  1  1

table(mms$red.hot.clean)  ## ## 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ## 3 9 8 18 18 12 7 2 7  The other option is to simply cut the outliers out of the dataset to make a new body of data We start with nrow(mms)  ## [1] 84  cases, then: trimmms<- mms[which(mms$red.hot<8.375),]
table(trimmms\$red.hot)

##
##  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8
##  3  9  8 18 18 12  7  2  5


Which leaves us with less data to work with.

nrow(trimmms)

## [1] 82


Either route, make sure you explain and justify your choices in your methodology section. This week's lab is going to use the height and weight data again, you will need to bin and transform data, as well as deal with outliers and and missing data. Once again all the code you will need is within this tutorial, but you will need to change it to work in a new setting. You should also practice writing your own code and developing your own style. Some people always write variable names in CAPs or lowercase. You can use periods or underscores to represent spaces and much more. Experiment and find a style that works for you. Good luck!