Warm up

Before we introduce the data, let’s warm up with some simple exercises. Update the YAML of your R Markdown file with your information, knit, commit, and push your changes. Make sure to commit with a meaningful commit message. Then, go to your repo on GitHub and confirm that your changes are visible in your Rmd and md files. If anything is missing, commit and push again.

Packages

We’ll use the tidyverse package for the first part of this assignment. For the second part you get to choose which package to use.

library(tidyverse)

Part 1 - Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the ugliest of them all?

Here is a simple plot using the mpg dataset, which contains information on fuel economy of cars. We’re plotting highway miles per gallon vs. city miles per gallon, coloured by whether the car is front-wheel drive, rear wheel drive, or four-wheel drive.

ggplot(data = mpg, aes(x = cty, y = hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point()

⊕I realize that “ugly” is subjective, so we’re mostly looking to see if you can figure out how to change the look of a plot using help files of functions you haven’t learned before.

1. Make this plot as ugly as possible by changing colours, background color, fonts, or anything else you can think of. You will probably want to play around with theme options, but you can do more. You can also search online for other themes, fonts, etc. that you want to tweak. Try to make it as ugly as possible, the sky is the limit!

🧶 ✅ ⬆️ Knit, commit, and push your changes to GitHub with an appropriate commit message. Make sure to commit and push all changed files so that your Git pane is cleared up afterwards.

Part 2 - You gotta pick a package or two

But really, one is enough. Pick a package from the list below, and use it to do something. If you want to use a package not on this list, that’s also ok, but it needs to be a package we haven’t used in class. If you start with a package and are struggling to get it to work, ask for help on Piazza or just move to another one.

⊕Remember: You install the package in the Console, not in the R Markdown document since you don’t want to keep reinstalling it every time you knit the document.

Your task is to install the package you pick. Depending on where the package comes from, how you install the package differs:

• If the package is on CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network), you can install it with install.packages.
• If the package is only on Github (most likely because it is still under development), you need to use the install_github function.

Then, load the package. Regardless of how you installed the package you can load it with the library function.

Finally, do something with the package. It doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, keep it simple. The goal is for you to read and understand the package documentation to carry out a simple task.

⊕Note: For the output generated by some of these packages to show up properly, you might need to change the output of your R Markdown document from github_document to html_document in the YAML of your R Markdown document.

2. Which package are you using? State the name of the package, whether it was on CRAN or GitHub, and include the code for loading it. Also include a one sentence description of what the package does.Then, do something with the package and provide a brief narrative including code and output. Also comment on difficulties you had, if any, figuring out how to use the package.

install.packages("PACKAGENAME")

library(devtools)
install_github("USERNAME/PACKAGENAME")