The findviews package helps exploring wide data sets, by detecting, ranking and plotting groups of statistically dependent columns. It relies heavily on ggplot2 and shiny.
findviews is expecially useful to get quickly familiar with a new dataset. Load
your data in a data frame, call findviews
, and you are ready to go.
You may download findviews' latest release as follows:
install.packages("findviews")
Alternatively, you may install the latest development version:
devtools::install_github("tsellam/findviews")
The findviews package is based on three functions:
findviews
detects and plots groups of dependent variables. This function is useful to explore new datasets.findviews_to_compare
callsfindviews
and ranks the views by how well they separate two arbitrary subsets of the data. This function is useful to compare groups - for instance "Young people" vs. "Old people" in a survey dataset, or "Winners" vs. "Losers" for a sports use case.findviews_to_predict
callsfindviews
and ranks the views by how well they predict an arbitrary variable. This function is useful to understand how one particular column is influenced by the other variables in the database - for instance, "Salary" in a census database.
The following sections describe these 3 functions in more detail.
findviews
is the most important function in the package. It takes a data
frame or a matrix as input, as well as a few optional parameters described in
its R documentation. It then performs the following operations:
- It detects columns types and removes unpractical columns (e.g., primary keys or constants values).
- It computes the statistical dependency between all the pairs of colums.
- It detects clusters of dependent columns - that is, views.
- It plots the views with ggplot2 and loads them in a Shiny app.
You may call findviews
as follows:
findviews(mtcars)
As a result, R will start a browser and display the views.
You can pick a view on the left panel and visualize it in the main panel.
The function findviews
can generate views, but it cannot tell which ones to
look at. This where findviews_to_predict
and findviews_to_compare
come in.
Those two functions generate views, exactly as findviews
does (in
fact, they call findviews
internally) but they also rank the results.
The function findviews_to_compare
ranks views which highlight how two groups
of row differ from each other. Suppose for intance that we wish to compare
the rows for which mpg > 20
and those for which mpg < 20
. We call the
function as follows:
findviews_to_compare(mtcars$mpg >= 20 , mtcars$mpg < 20 , mtcars)
The result is a set of views on which the two groups have different statistical distributions:
The aim of findviews_to_predict
is to help users understand how a specific
column is influenced by the other columns in the database. For instance,
suppose that we wish to understand what influences the variable mpg
in the
mtcars
data set. We would call findviews_to_predict
as follows:
findviews_to_predict('mpg', mtcars)
The result is a ranked set of views, as shown below.
The functions findviews
, findviews_to_predict
and findviews_to_compare
present their results with Shiny. At times, this method can be heavy and we may
prefer to obtain the results directly as R objects (possibly to use them in a
more complex workflow). This is possible, with the _core
functions. The
functions findviews_core
, findviews_to_predict_core
and
findviews_to_compare_core
operate exactly as their counterparts, but they
return their results as lists and data frames.
Beware: the recommendations of findviews must be taken with a huge grain of salt. Some of its views are absurd. They are artifacts of the algorithms, or the system just "got lucky" and made totally spurious findings. Inversely, findviews will almost surely miss important aspects of the data.
In summary, findviews is designed to help you get started with a data set and give some inspiration. But it cannot replace critical judgement. In fact, the best way to use it is to understand what it does. To this end, I encourage you to read the functions' R documentation.
This work is carried out at the Dutch center for mathematics and computer science (CWI). It is funded by the national project COMMIT.