Introduction to R

Overview

R is a programming language and software environment primarily focused on performing statistics, data analysis and visualisation. This course will provide an all-purpose introduction to the R programming language and may provide an accessible entry to computer programming in general. Throughout the workshop, participants will be taught using RStudio and introduced to best practices from the beginning, including how to document work in a script. Participants will learn how to import, manage and process data for statistical analysis and visualisation. They will leave with a solid understanding of how to run R commands and the properties of R objects, providing a solid basis for self-guided learning of more complex analyses.

Course Objectives

• Know how to use Rstudio to write scripts and run R commands

• Understand the different types of objects for storing data and the importance of different data types

• Learn how to read in data, manipulate it and save the output

• Learn how to visualise data in commonly used figures

• Know how to perform some basic inferential statistical tests

• Learn definitions of fundamental programming terminology and concepts that are transferable to other programming languages such as variable, function and for loops.

Pre-requisite Knowledge

This is a course for novices so there is no pre-requisite knowledge.