Raw Energy and Temperature Data

Pomona College’s Studio Art building energy data.

The CSV file, Pomona_StudioArt_EnergyDemand_1yr.csv, contains raw energy and temperature data for different components

In this workshop, we will

Get Ready (w/ RStudio Project)

  1. Download the csv file into your desktop or
  2. Open RStudio
  3. Create a new project (File > New Project)
  4. Move the csv file into your project folder

Import CSV data

  1. Click on the csv file
  2. Select Import Dataset…
  3. Check out the options and rename the data set df

The data set you just imported is now data frame object in your environment. (Check out the Global Environment)

Columns are variables and rows are observations. Let’s check out the names of the columns of the data frame:

names(df)
## NULL

Data Preparation

Name Change

Let’s simplify the names to something meaningful yet shorter than current ones.

header <- c("Timestamp","SA.demand","PV.demand","CH.demand","MDB.demand","LDB.demand","H1.demand","LDB.temp","CH.temp","H1.temp","MDB.temp","PV.temp","SA.temp")
names(df) <- header
names(df)

Subset the data set

Let’s create a new data frame that only contains Studio Art’s demand and temperature columns along with Timestamp column. There are different ways to subset data frame. The following shows two simple ways.

sa <- subset(df, select = c("Timestamp","SA.demand","SA.temp"))
sa1 <- df[,c(1,2,13)]
# Are these identical?
identical(sa, sa1)

Now let’s do this subsetting for all the other sensors (devices) data. Remember we have six sensors (devices): SA, PV, CH, MDB, LDB, and H1.

pv <- subset(df, select = c("Timestamp","PV.demand","PV.temp"))
ch <- subset(df, select = c("Timestamp","CH.demand","CH.temp"))
mdb <- subset(df, select = c("Timestamp","MDB.demand","MDB.temp"))
ldb <- subset(df, select = c("Timestamp","LDB.demand","LDB.temp"))
h1 <- subset(df, select = c("Timestamp","H1.demand","H1.temp"))

Now we want to see simple summary stats of these data.

summary(pv)

Something doesn’t seem to right… Look at the demand class. It is always recommended to check the class of converted/imported data frame’s columns.

How can we change the character objects to numeric objects?

sa$SA.demand <- as.numeric(sa$SA.demand)
pv$PV.demand <- as.numeric(pv$PV.demand)
ch$CH.demand <- as.numeric(ch$CH.demand)
mdb$MDB.demand <- as.numeric(mdb$MDB.demand)
ldb$LDB.demand <- as.numeric(ldb$LDB.demand)
h1$H1.demand <- as.numeric(h1$H1.demand)

Data Visualization with Simple Plotting

Let’s try plotting our sa data frame.

library(ggplot2) # requires for qplot
qplot(Timestamp, SA.demand, data=sa, geom="line")

Further Subsetting

I see two problems here: NAs and too many data points. There are missing values in the data set. SA.demand and the plot shows the one full year of data, so there are too many data points. I can subset around a month, for example, August:

sa.aug <- subset(sa, 
                 format(`Timestamp`, "%Y-%m-%m") >= "2017-08-01" &
                 format(`Timestamp`, "%Y-%m-%m") < "2017-09-01")

qplot(Timestamp, SA.demand, data=sa.aug, geom="line")

For more information about subsetting data frame, see https://www.r-bloggers.com/5-ways-to-subset-a-data-frame-in-r/ for example.

Tidy Data

See https://ramnathv.github.io/pycon2014-r/explore/tidy.html

What is Tidy Data? A dataset is said to be tidy if it satisfies the following conditions:

  • observations are in rows

  • variables are in columns

  • contained in a single dataset.

Tidy data makes it easy to carry out data analysis.

Look at this example:

library("reshape2") # need for melt

sa_tidy <- melt(sa, id = "Timestamp", 
                variable.name = "type", 
                value.name = "value", 
                na.rm = TRUE)
head(sa_tidy)

Let’s subset August 2017 data using the tidy data:

# subet sa_tidy into August data
sa_tidy.aug <- subset(sa_tidy, format(Timestamp, "%m") == "08", na.rm = TRUE)

# subset sa into demand and temp
sa_tody.aug.demand <- subset(sa_tidy.aug, type=="SA.demand")
sa_tody.aug.temp <- subset(sa_tidy.aug, type=="SA.temp")

# quick plot for SA Demand and Temp
qplot(Timestamp, value, data=sa_tody.aug.demand, geom="line")
qplot(Timestamp, value, data=sa_tody.aug.temp, geom="line")

# Use ggplot to display two values corresponding to different types
ggplot(data=sa_tidy.aug,
       aes(x=Timestamp, y=value, colour=type)) +
  geom_line()