One of the most useful things to know in R is that the dollar sign, $, lets you access variables within a data set. For example, if you’re looking at the dataset called labike, you might want to access the variable bike_count_pm to make a plot, to calculate the average, etc. To tell R you want that variable, use this syntax:

labike$bike_count_pm

## [1] 62 48 216 72 58 150 63 353 53 121 93 119 110 65 93 977 105
##[18] 56 164 97 35 39 97 73 42 103 153 138 145 35 118 90 391 52
##[35]220 155 49 40

What are these numbers? Well, R is printing out every value in that column of the dataset. Looking at Figure 18, you can see that the first value in that column is 62, and that is the first number listed by R, above. R prints values from left to right, and when it runs out of room on a line it starts over on the next line.

The numbers along the side tell you the index of that data point. So, 62 is the first data point, because it appears next to the [1], and 56 is the 18th data point, because it appears next to the [18].

mean(labike$bike_count_pm)
## [1] 132.9

In this example, we are taking the mean of the variable bike_count_pm, and it is 132.9. Because this is only one number, the index [1] appears next to it.

Another useful thing to know about are square brackets, []. These brackets let you access values in a dataset by their index (described on the useful terms page). A data frame has two dimensions, so you need to either specify two numbers, or leave a blank space if you want all of a certain dimension.

labike[10, 2]
## [1] -118.3

labike[10, ]

## name longitude latitude type bike_count_pm ped_count_pm
## 10 Echo Park & Sunset -118.3 34.08 none 121 1369

The first example here is showing us the 10th row of the labike dataset, and the second column (which is the longitude). The second example is not specifying a column, so it shows us the entire 10th row of the dataset.

If you want to know some basic frequencies or statistics about a particular variable, summary() is a very useful command.

summary(labike$type)

So, for the variable type, the summary() command tells us how many responses there were in each of those categories.

summary(labike$bike_count_pm)

If you use summary() on a variable that is numeric, like bike_count_pm, it gives us some basic statistics, like the minimum and maximum values, the median and mean, and the 1st and 3rd quartiles.

Sometimes you want to know how many values are contained within a dataset or a variable. length() and dim() allow you to find that out.

dim(labike)

## [1] 38 6

length(labike$latitude)
## [1] 38

This is what we expected, because the variable is just as long as the dataset has rows.

To get summaries of the number of variables in a given category (or set of categories), table() is a great command. If you run, you get a table of values (sometimes called a contingency table)

table(cdc$gender)
 
## 
##    Female	Male 
##	7036	6992
 
table(cdc$gender, cdc$general_health)
 
## 
##        Excellent Very good Good Fair Poor 
## Female      615      1597  2661 1106  183
## Male       1294      1982  2053  578  118

Notice that providing two variables as arguments resulted in a two-way contingency table.

R has a few useful functions for learning about variables. One is class(),

class(labike) 
 
## [1] "data.frame"
 
class(labike$type) 
 
## [1] "factor"
 
class(labike$latitude) 
 
## [1] "numeric" 

A similar function that provides a little more information is attributes(),

attributes(labike)

attributes(labike$type)

attributes(labike$latitude)

## NULL

Notice that class(labike$latitude) told us something about the latitude variable, but that attributes(labike$latitude) returned a NULL response. So, attributes() isn’t always the better choice.

For the dataset labike, the attributes() function told us the names of every column in the dataset (the variables) as well as the row names. In this case, the row names are just numbers, but you could imagine cases when the rows would have names, maybe students in a class. Then, it tells us the class, which is the same thing the class() function told us– data.frame. For the type variable, we got a little more information. Not only do we learn that the class is factor, we also see all the levels. Levels are possible values for a factor variable. If you had a multiple-choice question, maybe the levels would be A, B, C, D. In this case, they’re things like “bike route”.