Inspecting the data

The first task when confronted with a new dataset is to study it to ensure that we understand what it contains.

The all-london-2012-athletes.xlsx file is small enough that it's been provided with the sample code for this chapter. We can inspect the data with Incanter, as we did in Chapter 1, Statistics using the incanter.excel/read-xls and incanter.core/view functions:

(ns cljds.ch3.examples
  (:require [incanter.charts :as c]
            [incanter.core :as i]
            [incanter.excel :as xls]
            [incanter.stats :as s]))

(defn athlete-data []
  (-> (io/resource "all-london-2012-athletes.xlsx")
      (str)
      (xls/read-xls)))

(defn ex-3-1 []
  (i/view (athlete-data)))

If you run this code (either in the REPL or on the command line with lein run –e 3.1), you should see the following output:

We're fortunate that the data is clearly labeled in the columns and contains the following information:

• Name of the athlete

• Country for which they are competing

• Age in years...