You can get all the material by downloading and unziping the github repository contents. See image below: press the button at the end of the red arrow, then that of the blue arrow, and finally unzip the material into a folder of your choice.
Learning goals
Obtain a working knowledge about the R software and environment, to be able to implement basic data analysis
Integration of R and RStudio, an helpful R interface, via a short introduction to R and RStudio followed by a hands on assisted tutorial
The R environment
R is both a programming language and an environment for statistical computation
R is free open source software
Created in 1995 by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland
gets its name from another famous programming language for data analysis, S
Project run by the “R Core Development Team”
Software and many resources available at the r-project.org/
R: a selected timeline
The R base + packages
R base installation comes with a number of libraries which provide access to a large number of commonly used features (e.g. linear models, survival analysis, basic statistical distributions, etc)
One of R’s key strengths comes from the fact that many more packages are available online, under constant increase
The R environment
R was traditionally accessed solely via the command line, making the learning curve rather steep for beginners
Here we focus on Rstudio, a program to interface with R, making many of the most common tasks simpler. Let’s open Rstudio shall we?
RStudio
(as R) Free and open source
An integrated development environment for data analysis
Simplifies the user interaction with R
In a single application you have access to a number of windows containing the code, the command line, the figures, the help, a windows explorer, etc.
Let us create a dynamic report from scratch in RMarkdown via RStudio
Set Title and author
Let us create a dynamic report from scratch in RMarkdown via RStudio
Almost there
This is what you should be seeing. Check your title and name are there.
Compile the .Rmd
To do so press the “Knit” button. After you do you are asked to save the files, tell RStudio where it should do so it and what is the file name (I am using “My1stDynamicReport.Rmd”)
If you run into issues
Regarding “latin” characters showing, like say “é”, “õ” and â”
Et voilá
Your first dynamic report is ready
If you want it in the viewer pane
Unless you have customized RStudio to do otherwise, the html appears in a new window. To have it in the viewer pane, change the options under Tools| Global Options
Possible outputs
Your now have your first HTML automatically generated, obtained from compiling (=knitting) the .Rmd file (“My1stDynamicReport.Rmd”).
Actually, the output could also be a Word file or a PDF.
Not all possible features are available in word
Generating PDF’s requires some additional software (LaTex) - you can try that on your own. Good luck ;)
Experiment with the .Rmd file
Try to insert a new bit of code with Code|insert chunck (shortcut Ctrl+Al+I)
Change a chunck’s options (e.g. eval, echo, etc) from TRUE to FALSE and see what whappens to the output
Try to use dynamic numbers like this one: -0.3658839 printing the mean value of 5 random Gaussian numbers. For that you need to use something like `? mean(rnorm(5))` (note: replace the “?” with the leter “r” so that it knows you want to run r code).
