How to quickly load some sample data (in Julia)

Task

Sometimes you just need to try out a new piece of code, whether it be data manipulation, statistical computation, plotting, or whatever. And it’s handy to be able to quickly load some example data to work with. There is a lot of freely available sample data out there. What’s the easiest way to load it?

Solution

The R programming language comes with many free datasets built in. To make these same datasets available to Julia programmers as well, you can install and import the RDatasets package.

First, ensure that you have it installed, by running the Julia commands using Pkg and then Pkg.add( "RDatasets" ). Then you can get access to many datasets as follows:

using RDatasets
iris = dataset( "datasets", "iris" )
first( iris, 5 ) # just show the first 5 rows

5×5 DataFrame

Row	SepalLength	SepalWidth	PetalLength	PetalWidth	Species
	Float64	Float64	Float64	Float64	Cat…
1	5.1	3.5	1.4	0.2	setosa
2	4.9	3.0	1.4	0.2	setosa
3	4.7	3.2	1.3	0.2	setosa
4	4.6	3.1	1.5	0.2	setosa
5	5.0	3.6	1.4	0.2	setosa

But what datasets are available? There are many! You can find a full list in the package itself.

RDatasets.packages()

34×2 DataFrame

9 rows omitted

Row	Package	Title
	String15	String
1	COUNT	Functions, data and code for count data.
2	Ecdat	Data sets for econometrics
3	HSAUR	A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using R (1st Edition)
4	HistData	Data sets from the history of statistics and data visualization
5	ISLR	Data for An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R
6	KMsurv	Data sets from Klein and Moeschberger (1997), Survival Analysis
7	MASS	Support Functions and Datasets for Venables and Ripley's MASS
8	SASmixed	Data sets from "SAS System for Mixed Models"
9	Zelig	Everyone's Statistical Software
10	adehabitatLT	Analysis of Animal Movements
11	boot	Bootstrap Functions (Originally by Angelo Canty for S)
12	car	Companion to Applied Regression
13	cluster	Cluster Analysis Extended Rousseeuw et al.
⋮	⋮	⋮
23	plm	Linear Models for Panel Data
24	plyr	Tools for splitting, applying and combining data
25	pscl	Political Science Computational Laboratory, Stanford University
26	psych	Procedures for Psychological, Psychometric, and Personality Research
27	quantreg	Quantile Regression
28	reshape2	Flexibly Reshape Data: A Reboot of the Reshape Package.
29	robustbase	Basic Robust Statistics
30	rpart	Recursive Partitioning and Regression Trees
31	sandwich	Robust Covariance Matrix Estimators
32	sem	Structural Equation Models
33	survival	Survival Analysis
34	vcd	Visualizing Categorical Data

Content last modified on 24 July 2023.

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Contributed by Nathan Carter (ncarter@bentley.edu)