Tutorial 4

Hello,

This is a technology tutorial for R and RStudio. In this tutorial, we aim to introduce what R and RStudio is and a process to setup it. It also includes some helpful resources to learn R. This tutorial's table of contents is:

  1. Overview
  2. Get started (How to set up R & RStudio)
  3. How to use RStudio: Your first code in R
  4. Additional Useful R Package
  5. Resources

R is a freely available language and environment for statistical computing and graphics which provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. R is freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence; its development and distribution are carried out by several statisticians known as the R Development Core Team. However, anyone can contribute code in the form of packages to broaden R’s functionality.

There are two main reasons why R is broadly used in not only statistics but also general data science. First R language itself is really straightforward because R is an interpreted language, not a compiled one. In other words, all commands typed on the keyboard are directly executed without requiring to build a complete program like in most computer language. Also, R’s syntax is very simple and intuitive. For instance, a linear regression can be done with the command lm(y~x) which means “fitting a linear model with y as response and x as predictor”.

Second, R is really powerful to analyze data and provide diverse tools to make a smooth communication. Today’s data analysts need to be able to access data from a wide range of sources, merge the pieces of data together, clean and annotate them, analyze them with the latest methods, present the findings in meaningful and graphically appealing ways, and incorporate the results into attractive reports that can be distributed to stakeholders and the public. And R is ideally suited to accomplish these goals.

To set up R, you need to go to Could CRAN. Please refer a tech tutorial write-up for further details. You also can learn how to start programming in R from the tech tutorial write-up.

If you have any questions, please let me know! I can help you set up R and find more information if you need.

This is a slide deck for Tech tutorial 4 (R/RStudio). And here's the tech tutorial write-up