26/11/2019
Slides available at https://ThiagoROliveira.com/IntroToR

Outline

Outline

  • Motivation to learn R
  • R basics
    • Using R as a calculator
    • Creating and manipulating objects in R
    • Loading data sets into R
  • Data manipulation and exploration
    • Plots
    • Linear models


Slides available at https://ThiagoROliveira.com/IntroToR

Motivation to learn R

What is this course about?

Statistical packages for data analysis

Stuff that you can do using:

  • MS Excel
  • SPSS
  • Stata
  • SAS
  • Matlab

But using the R programming language

But why should I learn R?

Because:

  • R is free
  • R is open source
  • R is very versatile
  • R is very good for data visualisation
  • R is a programming language

On the other hand:

  • R has a steep(er) learning curve
  • R is a programming language

But why should I learn R?

With R, you can…

  • Do data analysis
  • Use multiple data frames simultaneously
  • Analyse different kinds of data (e.g., text, network, spatial)
  • Collect data from the internet (webscrapping)
  • Write your own functions
  • Write your own packages

But why should I learn R?

R is getting popular…

Alright. Where should I start?

To obtain R, visit https://cran.r-project.org/

  • CRAN: The Comprehensive R Archive Network
  • Select the link that matches your operating system and then follow the installation instructions

What next?

Highly recommended: use RStudio

  • Open-source programme that facilitates the use of R
  • Visit http://www.rstudio.com/ and follow the download and installation instructions