Intro to R

23 March 2018

What is R and why use it?

Statistical programming language
Used around the world
Open source
- Free as in beer
- Free as in speech

Help!

Excellent support (e.g.)
Online courses
- https://www.datacamp.com/courses/tech:r
- https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science
User groups
- http://edinbr.org/
- https://twitter.com/hashtag/rstats

The R interface

fig:

The R interface

fig:

Packages

First rule of programming
- has someone else done it already?
Packages are add ons to increase functionality
Today we'll use
- tidyverse: https://www.tidyverse.org/
- igraph: http://igraph.org/r/

R signposts

function() Anything with brackets is a function, like a spreadsheet
%>% A pipe can send output from a function to the next line
<- and = can generally be used
?function brings up help menu
# this is a comment

Helpful lingo

"Data frame" is a table with rows and columns
"Vector" is a set of values that are all the same type:
- Numeric
- Character
- …

Tidyverse packages

readr for reading plain text files
dplyr for database type operations
tidyr for wide to long transformations
ggplot2 for visualisation