Loading Data

Acquiring data, and transforming it into a workable state, can be one of the most time consuming parts of data analysis. In a later chapter we'll look at this process in more detail, but right now we're going to take a short-cut. If you're using the project template, as described in the introduction, the data is already available and ready to go.

Open up the file Explore.scala

data is defined. Let's take a sneak peek at it.

creativescala.Explore.data
val res0: List[creativescala.data.HadCrut5.Record] =
  List(
    Record(1850,1,-0.67456436,-0.98177195,-0.3673568),
    Record(1850,2,-0.333416,-0.700901,0.034069024),
    Record(1850,3,-0.59132266,-0.9339191,-0.2487262),
    ...

Explain the data.

Record is year, month, anomaly, lower, upper.

What is a List? Zero or more elements, with a defined order.

How can we get an understanding of the data?

creativescala.Explore.data.size
// 2082

creativescala.Explore.data.head
// creativescala.data.HadCrut5.Record = Record(1850,1,-0.67456436,-0.98177195,-0.3673568)

This won't scale. Better to visualize the data. What should we visualize? For each year as a line of month versus anomaly.