First Post

I'm trying to blog in order to exercise my R skills and as an outlet for my own interest in data analysis... or data science, since that's the new "buzz term".

I'm using R (currently, version 3.2.1) and RStudio (currently, version 0.99.441) on an "aging" Acer Aspire TimelineX laptop running Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' for its operating system (OS).

So, for my first post, I'm analysing data that I had previously looked at using Stata12.  Since migrating to R, I'm finding that the graphical output is much better.  Please note that the following graphs are using the base graphics package.

My first plot is Weekly U.S. Retail Gasoline Prices:

Followed by Weekly U.S. Total Stocks:

These are exploratory graphs.  I am just viewing the data.  The price data will probably show a strong correlation with oil prices (which I will show in a later post).  The stock quantities graph looked interesting, so I created a more detailed graph using the 'ggplot2' graphics package:

There was an interesting decrease in the quantities of gasoline stocks that began around 1992 through 1996.  Quantities of gasoline stocks did not show an increase until 2007.  This may be worth exploring further.