Please complete the following using RMarkdown to generate an HTML or word document to hand in.

  1. Install the plyr library.

  2. Load the data file you generated from your last lab. Load it as an excel file (not a csv!). Then load it as a csv. Looking at the head of the excel and csv generated data frames, are there any differences?

  3. What does the output of str and summary tell you about the data you generated? Do you get different results from the excel versus csv loaded data frames?

  4. Add a column to mtcars called Model which uses the rownames of mtcars as its values. Show me the head of the data frame to see if it's been done correctly.

  5. Let's use the rbind.fill function in plyr, as it's pretty powerful. Let's say you want to add a new row to mtcars for a new model. Make a new data frame with the following columns: Model = Fizzywig, mpg=31.415, awesomness=11. Now try to make a new data frame where you rbind mtcars and this new data frame. What happens? Then, make a new data frame here you use plyr::rbind.fill to combine them. Examine the resulting data frame. What do you see?

  6. What kind of data are you thinking about working with for your final project? Give me a brief description of the data.