In this post I’ll look at the steps to import, clean and begin modelling a real world dataset exploring longitudinal Consumer Price Index changes for OECD countries. This data has been pulled from Kaggle. For this exercise, we’ll look at the CPI changes across Australia, New Zealand, United States and Canada. Our data is sitting in a unique csv file for each country. We’ll start slow by inspecting the shape of the data and construct a method for pulling/cleaning this information to suit our needs.

One of the things I’ve been most fascinated with in my R learnings is how much beauty there can be in some forms of data visualisations. This stems from an early exposure to things like Dawkin’s Biomorphs and more recently the fantastic work at R-graphs Data art portfolio. Today I’m going to look at some reproducible, open source art from Petr Keil to find a serviceable background image for this site.