Jeffrey Breen just gave a talk entitled “Tapping the Data Deluge with R” to the Boston Predictive Analytics Meetup. He suggests there are two types of data in this world
- Data you have, and
- Data you don’t have…yet.
In the talk Jeffrey provided a nice overview of several methods for importing data into R, including:
- Reading CSV files
- Reading XLS files
- Reading data formats from other statistics packages (e.g., SPSS, Stata, etc.)
- Reading email data
- Reading online data files
- Web scraping data
- Using APIs to access data
He also touches on some of the R packages that are useful for adding supplementary data to enrich an analysis (e.g., zipcode).