Project: Analyzing Forest Fire Data

My experience completing my first R project.

I am excited to announce that I have finished the data visualization in R course as part of Dataquest’s Data Analyst track in R. The final assignment in this course was an actual project(my first R project) taking what I’ve learned up until this point to analyze forest fire data from Portugal.

It was an interesting project with a few challenges. For one, I had to put the months and days in chronological order to make the charts easier to read. I learned about changing a data type using factor. Once I got the code part down, however, I couldn’t get it to work. It took a while but I finally figured out what happened. I was not executing the code in the right order! Once I figured that out, my code execution went smoothly.

Another challenge was finding a place to share the project. I am familiar with Jupyter Notebook and Google Colab for data science projects using Python but was unaware of a similar solution for R. Thanks to the Dataquest community, I learned that I could write my project as a R Markdown and publish it at RPubs. After writing the project as a R Markdown, I tried to publish it but it did not work. Turns out, I needed to install knitr and update XQuartz.

Once that was done, I was able to publish my work which you can find in the projects section of this site. Check it out and let me know your thoughts! In the future, I want to publish my code on Github.

Until next time…