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HW 1 ~ due Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013

For this assignment, submit a zipped folder named hw1.zip that contains four files that contain the entire interactive console session for each of these activities. The file names should be pr1.txt, pr2.txt, pr3.txt, and pr4.txt.

1. For pr1.txt, work through the examples in the "First R example session" by UC Davis's Norm Matloff, which is available from this link, starting on page 7.



2. For problem 2, work through the examples in the "Tutorial for the R Statistical Package" by UC Denver's Stephanie Santorico and Mark Shin, whose text, datasets, and example script are available from this link. The thirty-page tutorial may seem like a lot, but it flows very quickly -- and has a wonderful overview of R's capabilities and some of its technical details. For each of the five sections/chapters in that tutorial, submit a separate file with the contents of your console interactions:
   • pr2_1.txt
   • pr2_2.txt
   • pr2_3.txt
   • pr2_4.txt
   • pr2_5.txt
   By working through this tutorial, your hw1 folder will end up containing several data files -- this is OK -- please submit those, too.



3. For pr3.txt, download this hw1_data.zip file, unzip it, and read the dataset into R using the commands you encountered in problem 2, above. Then, at the interactive console prompt, compose commands that solve the challenges in this quiz. Of course, you may try as many times as you like to get the solutions, but after you come up with each solution, include a comment at the prompt similar to this:

       # above is the solution to Q. 1
         



4. For pr4.txt, read through the first five chapters of the Data Science Text by Syracuse's Jeffrey Stanton. As you do, complete the examples that the chapters explain (in fact, only chapters 3 and 5 have examples). This is about 39 pages, but it is smooth reading with a solid foundation of what is meant by "Data Science".
   
   Finally, create a data frame in the style of Chapter 5's "family members" example, but using the data from three columns -- class (name/characters), states (number), and food (also characters) -- from all of the students in IST 380 that we collected on the first day. That data is now posted here (click for a larger view) , but in image form -- so you'll need to create the dataset yourself. You're welcome to do it in R by hand, but you're equally welcome to input it into Excel, save it as a .csv file, and then read it into R! Finally, use summary to print a statistical summary of all of that data, too. Submit your console interactions as pr4.txt.