Introduction to R

This is the course homepage for the introductory course to R for LIFE employees and PhD students 2008. The course will provide an introduction to the statistical software R for people with a basic knowledge of statistical concepts.

Time: Thursday, January 29th 2009, 9:00 - 12:00

R has become the lingua franca in statistics and many applied fields. The flexibility and large number of user-contributed packages makes it an extremely useful statistical toolbox for almost any data analysis and visualization problem. We will introduce the windows version of R (downloadable for free at www.r-project.org) for people with little or no prior knowledge of R.

The subjects covered will include:

Introduction to the R language
Importing data into R
Graphical functions
ANOVA and regression models, r*k tables, and chi-square tests

Our aim is to present a hands-on approach. We will provide an overview of the capabilities of R and introduce functions to analyse common statistical problems.

The course will be a mixture of talks and frequent practical sessions. If you have your own data, then you are free to work on that also.

Practical details
Installing R on your computer
R material to get started
Books about R

Practical details

Time: Thursday, January 29th 2009, 9:00 - 12:00
Place: auditorium 3-11
Note: due to the number of participants we are moving the course from one of the computer rooms to a larger lecture room. As a consequence you should bring your own laptop with R installed. Please make sure that your battery is full so we minimize the number of power cables.

The follow-up workshop will be on Tuesday Feb. 17th from 13-16 in Auditorium 1-15. Please email Ib (ims@life.ku.dk) if you plan to attend.

Installing R on your computer

To download R go to CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network) from the R homepage (www.r-project.org). CRAN is also where you find extra packages for R.

Windows and Mac users should download one of the precompiled binary distributions from the home page and install that version:

Windows uses should follow the Windows->base link and then download the exe-file to their computer (at the time of this writing the file is named "R-2.8.1-win32.exe" but a more recent version may appear before the course. Once the file is downloaded you should run it and it will install R.

Linux users: the installation procedure depends on your distribution of linux. Usually linux users are savvy enough to figure out how to install programs on the machines, and R is part of all major distributions (debian, ubuntu, redhat, suse, ...). If you are having trouble installing R on your linux machine then let us know well in advance of the course. If you are running Ubuntu then you can enter the Synaptic package manager and then install the package "r-base" (make sure that r-core and r-recommended are installed as well).

R material

Several notes have been produced at LIFE for introducing R to students and researchers. These are free to download and print.

A note on R: Basic statistical analyses. These notes were written for an older version of the course "Statistik Dataanalyse 1".
Noter om R by Morten Larsen and Peter Sestoft (in Danish). These notes are used for introducing students at LIFE to R in the course "Matematik og Databehandling". The notes provide a great introduction to R but with very little emphasis on statistics.
For more information on the notes see the homepage of the notes
Slides from the R course
Exercises from the R course
Data sets used in some of the exercises.
- cats.txt. Sex and heart weight of cats in ASCII format.
- highschool.xls. Applications score for 1000 applicants for Nursing Schools based on the "quality/reputation" of their high school.
- cats.xpt
- parakeet.txt. Dataset to investiagte if parakeets are more likely to sing if music is played close to their cage.
R code run at the course
The following books might be of interest to new R users. Follow the links to get more information on the books.

Claus Ekstrøm (ekstrom@life.ku.dk)
Christian Ritz (ritz@kvl.dk)
Last updated 26. December 2008