Acquiring and Sharing Data
Introduction
Effective Data Science is still a work-in-progress. This chapter is largely complete and just needs final proof reading.
If you would like to contribute to the development of EDS, you may do so at https://github.com/zakvarty/data_science_notes.
Data can be difficult to acquire and gnarly when you get it.
The raw material that you work with as a data scientist is, unsurprisingly, data. In this part of the course we will focus on the different ways in which data can be stored, distributed and obtained.
Being able to obtain and read a dataset is often a surprisingly large hurdle in getting a new data science project off the ground. The skill of being able to source and read data from many locations is usually sanitised during a statistics programme: you’re given a ready-to-go, cleaned CSV file and all focus is placed on modelling. This week aims to remedy that by equipping you with the skills to acquire and manage your own data.
We will begin this week by explore different file types. This dictates what type of information you can store, who can access that information and how they read that it into R. We will then turn our attention to the case when data are not given to you directly. We will learn how to obtain data from a raw webpage and how to request data that via a service known as an API.