One of the most exciting areas in all of data science right now is wearable computing. Companies like Fitbit, Nike, and Jawbone Up are racing to develop the most advanced algorithms to attract new users. The data linked to from the course website represent data collected from the accelerometers from the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone. A full description is available at the site where the data was obtained:

http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Human+Activity+Recognition+Using+Smartphones

Here are the data for the project:

https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/getdata%2Fprojectfiles%2FUCI%20HAR%20Dataset.zip

The R script called run_analysis.R does the following.

1. Merges the training and the test sets to create one data set.
2. Extracts only the measurements on the mean and standard deviation for each measurement.
3. Uses descriptive activity names to name the activities in the data set.
4. Appropriately labels the data set with descriptive variable names.
5. Creates a second, independent tidy data set with the average of each variable for each activity and each subject.

There is a function named makeHARTidySet that takes as parameters the HAR directory and the dataset name we need to tidy (train or test).

makeHARTidySet reads the various data sources (train or test, activity_labels, features) and combines them in a single tidy data set (train or test).

[1] Davide Anguita, Alessandro Ghio, Luca Oneto, Xavier Parra and Jorge L. Reyes-Ortiz. Human Activity Recognition on Smartphones using a Multiclass Hardware-Friendly Support Vector Machine. International Workshop of Ambient Assisted Living (IWAAL 2012). Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. Dec 2012