Using R for Data Analysis and Graphics

General information

Course content

The course provides an introduction to the statistical software R for scientists. R is free software that contains a huge collection of functions with focus on statistics and graphics. If one wants to use R one has to learn the programming language R - on very rudimentary level. The course aims to facilitate this by providing a basic introduction to R.

• Part I of the course covers the following topics:
  • What is R?
  • R Basics: reading and writing data from/to files, creating vectors & matrices, selecting elements of dataframes, vectors and matrices, arithmetics;
  • Types of data: numeric, character, logical and categorical data, missing values;
  • Simple (statistical) functions: summary, mean, var, etc., simple statistical tests;
  • Writing simple functions;
  • Introduction to graphics: scatter-, boxplots and other high-level plotting functions, embellishing plots by title, axis labels, etc., adding elements (lines, points) to existing plots.
• Part II of the course builds on part I and covers the following additional topics:
  • Elements of the R language: control structures (if, else, loops), lists, overview of R objects, attributes of R objects;
  • More on R functions;
  • Applying functions to elements of vectors, matrices and lists;
  • Object oriented programming with R: classes and methods;
  • Tayloring R: options
  • Extending basic R: packages

The course focuses on practical work at the computer. We will make use of the graphical user interface RStudio

Note: Part I of UsingR is complemented and extended by Part II, which is offered during the second part of the semester and which can be taken independently from Part I.