Setup
Here you can read how to download and install R and R-studio, and how to download data files for the course.
| Setup Instructions | Download files required for the lesson | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 1. Before we Start |
How to find your way around RStudio? How to interact with R? How to manage your environment? How to install packages? |
| Duration: 00h 15m | 2. Introduction to R |
What data types are available in R? What is an object? How can values be initially assigned to variables of different data types? What arithmetic and logical operators can be used? How can subsets be extracted from vectors? How does R treat missing values? How can we deal with missing values in R? |
| Duration: 00h 55m | 3. Starting with Data |
What is a data.frame? How can I read a complete csv file into R? How can I get basic summary information about my dataset? |
| Duration: 01h 35m | 4. Data Wrangling with dplyr and tidyr |
How can I select specific rows and/or columns from a dataframe? How can I combine multiple commands into a single command? How can I create new columns or remove existing columns from a dataframe? How can I reformat a dataframe to meet my needs? |
| Duration: 02h 05m | 5. A couple of plots. And making our own functions |
How do I create scatterplots, boxplots, and barplots? How can I define my own functions? |
| Duration: 04h 00m | 6. What is the next step? |
“What do I do now?” “What is the next step?” |
| Duration: 04h 10m | Finish |
The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.
Data Sets
We will work with this data set in the course.
You do not need to download the file. We will do that together during the course.
Software Setup
Warning
Please do NOT install R and RStudio on Onedrive or other clouddrives. R will work but you will not be able to install the extensions to R that you will need in this course!
Installing R and RStudio
R and RStudio are separate downloads and installations. R is the underlying statistical computing environment, but using R alone is no fun. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R much easier and more interactive. You need to install R before you install RStudio. Once installed, because RStudio is an IDE, RStudio will run R in the background. You do not need to run it separately.
Rather than installing R and RStudio on your personal computer, Posit Cloud offers a free, online alternative, where you will be able to run R and RStudio in your browser. Sign up with your Google/Gmail account if you have one, or with any other email.
The free version of RStudio Cloud places limitations on the number of projects you can work on, and the amount of memory and processing power you can access. For the purposes of following these lessons, RStudio Cloud is perfectly adequate, and what we recommend if you have any problems installing R and RStudio on your personal computer.
If you already have R and RStudio installed
- Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
- To check which version of R you are using, start RStudio and the
first thing that appears in the console indicates the version of R you
are running. Alternatively, you can type
sessionInfo(), which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it. You can check here for more information on how to remove old versions from your system if you wish to do so.
If you don’t have R and RStudio installed
- Download R from the CRAN website.
- Run the
.exefile that was just downloaded. - Go to the RStudio download page.
- Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Windows. Vista/7/8/10 (where x, y, and z represent version numbers).
- Double click the file to install it.
- Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
If you already have R and RStudio installed
- Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
- To check the version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first
thing that appears on the terminal indicates the version of R you are
running. Alternatively, you can type
sessionInfo(), which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.2.
If you don’t have R and RStudio installed
- Download R from the CRAN website.
- Select the
.pkgfile for the latest R version. - Double click on the downloaded file to install R.
- It is also a good idea to install XQuartz (needed by some packages).
- Go to the RStudio download page.
- Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Mac OS X 10.6+ (64-bit) (where x, y, and z represent version numbers).
- Double click the file to install RStudio.
- Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
- Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN, they provide
information to get the most recent version of R for common
distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package
manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run
sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedorasudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this approach are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.2. - Go to the RStudio download page.
- Under Installers select the version that matches your
distribution, and install it with your preferred method (e.g., with
Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dpkg -i rstudio-x.yy.zzz-amd64.debat the terminal). - Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.