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 learners will be taught using RStudio and introduced to best practices from the beginning including how to document your work in a script. Over three sessions you will learn how to import, manage and process data for statistical analysis and visualisation. At the end of the workshop the participants will have 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

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

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

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

• how to visualise data in commonly used figures

• how to perform some basic inferential statistical tests

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

Pre-requisite Knowledge

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