R help - Mar 2001 - Question regarding Principle Component Analysis and R for Windows

Hi there,

I am a post-grad (Arts!) student trying to get to grips with R...

Though I am not statistically trained my research involves working with a 
large amount of numerical data currently held in Excel. I have been told by a 
Stats trained advisor that I should examine my data by some sort of 
Pricincipal Component Analysis.

My questions then are (all apologies if they seem simple but I am neither a 
programmer nor a mathematician)...

(1) Is there a way of moving all my data over from Excel into an R workspace 
or data folder.

(2) If I can get my data in R how do I start going about applying a 
priincipal component analysis to that data ( I have downloaded the PCA 
package from Professor Ripley's site)

(3) Is the 3D graphing package compatable with the PCA (mulivariate) package?


Sorry if these questions seem basic or too general but this all rather new to 
me (but I am keen to learn)

Cheers,

Marcus Dahl (Univ. Bristol English Dept.)
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On Thu, 29 Mar 2001 Marcusdahl at aol.com wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I am a post-grad (Arts!) student trying to get to grips with R...
>
> Though I am not statistically trained my research involves working with a
> large amount of numerical data currently held in Excel. I have been told by
a
> Stats trained advisor that I should examine my data by some sort of
> Pricincipal Component Analysis.
>
> My questions then are (all apologies if they seem simple but I am neither a
> programmer nor a mathematician)...
>
> (1) Is there a way of moving all my data over from Excel into an R
workspace
> or data folder.
Several. See the R Data Import/Export Manual. The simplest is to save as
csv files and import by read.csv, the adventurous is to use package RODBC.
> (2) If I can get my data in R how do I start going about applying a
> priincipal component analysis to that data ( I have downloaded the PCA
> package from Professor Ripley's site)
Eh?  PCA is part of package mva in base R, in function princomp (and
prcomp).  There is no PCA package on my site that I am aware of.
> (3) Is the 3D graphing package compatable with the PCA (mulivariate)
package?
Sorry, which two packages do you mean?  (Exact names and version numbers,
preferably.)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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