Introduction

Aim

• What is R
• Why use R
• Who use R
• Getting Started with R

What is R?

• A statistical programming environment
  • based on ‘S’
  • suited to high-level data analysis
• But offers much more than just statistics
• Open source and cross platform
• Extensive graphics capabilities
• Diverse range of add-on packages
• Active community of developers
• Thorough documentation

http://www.r-project.org/

R screenshot

New York Times, Jan 2009

Why R?

We can do lot of stuffs in R. Starting from statestical analysis to plotting graphs and figures, Writing technical documentation to making a website and lot more. Lets explore.

R plotting capabilities

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/visualizing-friendships/469716398919

Who uses R? Not just academics!

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/companies-using-r

• Facebook
  • http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/12/analysis-of-facebook-status-updates.html
• Google
  • http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2009/05/google-using-r-to-analyze-effectiveness-of-tv-ads.html
• Microsoft
  • http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/05/microsoft-uses-r-for-xbox-matchmaking.html
• New York Times
  • http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/03/how-the-new-york-times-uses-r-for-data-visualization.html
• Buzzfeed
  • http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/12/buzzfeed-uses-r-for-data-journalism.html
• New Zealand Tourist Board
  • https://mbienz.shinyapps.io/tourism_dashboard_prod/

R can facilitate Reproducible Research

Sidney Harris - New York Times

• Statisticians at MD Anderson tried to reproduce results from a Duke paper and unintentionally unravelled a web of incompetence and skullduggery
  • as reported in the New York Times

New York Times, July 2011

• Very entertaining talk from Keith Baggerly in Cambridge, December 2010

According to recent editorials, the reproducibility crisis is still on-going

Nature, May 2016

Reality check on reproducibility

1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility

Getting started

R can be done/executed using command line, or a graphical user interface (GUI). On this course, we use the RStudio GUI. Lets download required files and install.

1. Get latest version of R from CRAN
   • This will come will some base packages installed for general tasks.
   • We can also download additional required packages from CRAN for specific tasks, Currently 16328 available packages as of Mon Sep 21 09:58:59 2020
2. Download RStudio from here

To launch RStudio, find the RStudio icon and click

RStudio screenshot

Key Points

• Vast Graphics control in R
• Reproducibility can done with R

 

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