Workshop Proposal

The most up-to-date content of this proposal can be found at https://rpubs.com/emitanaka/rworkshop_proposal

Why R Workshop?

R is a programming language, with particular emphasis in statistical computing and graphics, that first appeared in 1993, i.e. 26 years ago. Over this time, R has grown exponentially in use and the R developers and users, collectively called the R community, have become diverse.

R has evolved significantly, particularly driven by a suite of R packages, collectively called tidyverse, that adopt a common design philosophy, grammar, and data structures. Additionally, R packages such as rmarkdown allow for seamless integration of the R language to produce various outputs including interactive html documents or applications. The increased use of these tools are shown in the increasing number of citations as shown in the figure below.

Many members of the biometrics community use R, however, modern evolvement of R means that many recent contributions are yet to be well adopted within the community. This workshop has a potential to raise the modern statistical programming literacy by teaching key tools and best practices that is increasingly adopted.

Proposal

Schedule

The tentative schedule for the workshop is as follows.

Time Content
9:00am - 11:00am Data Wrangling and Visualisation with R
11:00am - 11:30am Morning Tea Break
11:30am - 12:30pm Dynamic Documents with R Markdown Part I
12:30pm - 1:30pm Lunch
1:30pm - 2:30pm Dynamic Documents with R Markdown Part II
2:30pm - 3:30pm Building an R Package Part I
3:30pm - 4:00pm Afternoon Tea Break
4:00pm - 5:00pm Building an R Package Part II

Tentative Content

Data Visualisation and Wrangling with R

  • Explanation on the abstract framework of ggplot2.
  • Using ggplot2 to make beautiful visualisations.
  • Using plotly to make interactive plots.
  • Data wrangling using dplyr and tidyr.

Dynamic Documents with R Markdown

  • Using simple Rmd files for literate programming (embedding the code, output and text together) with emphasis in understanding the use of YAML.
  • Using R Markdown templates for producing pretty documents or journal articles.
  • Using xaringan to build html presentation.
  • (With time permitting) using bookdown to build your own reproducible book.

Building an R Package

  • Basics of building an R package.
  • Using roxygen2 for documentation of the R package.
  • Using pkgdown to easily make a website for your package.
  • Using testhat to make unit tests for your package.

Instructor

Dr. Emi Tanaka has an extensive experience in using R and development of software. She has contributed to various R packages and extensions, including shinycustomloader (an extension to shiny) and xaringan (html slides), that are well liked within the R community as seen in her github account (https://github.com/emitanaka). Her hacking ability was praised by Dr. Yihui Xie (software engineer for RStudio, author of many R Markdown related package such as knitr, rmarkdown, xaringan, bookdown and contributer to shiny) on his popular blog (https://yihui.name/en/2018/07/emi-tanaka/). She has given a number of tutorials and workshop related to the topics of this proposal that was well received. Sample of her slides related to the topic are shown below: