This week I read through and watched the video presentations for the chapters on the principles of analytic graphics and the chapter on exploratory graphs. After reading through these I had an understanding of how I could better use R studio to analyze data. Because of this, I decided it was time to start thinking about what question I want to ask about the data I’ve downloaded on Coral Reefs in the Hawaiian Islands. Right now, I’m thinking about trying to see which factor documented in the data negatively affects the coral reefs the most. The reason I’m interested in this is because the data provides for a lot of factors that could potentially negatively affect the coral reefs such as disease prevalence, the diversity within the coral reefs, the physical damage the coral reefs have sustained, the affects of bleaching in the ocean, biomass of the fish in the area, fishing pressure, and the amount of scleratinia present. There are more subsets of data present in this study, and so far I have listed the number of observations, variables, and the summary statistics for all 12 of them.
Since I currently have a question I want to explore in the data, I plan on looking more closely at the data with the next week by creating graphs to show any correlation between the data points and using other exploratory graphs to get a better understanding of what each data set shows.