Hello

In the lab class of Principles of biostatistics and epidemiology, our goal is to introduce you to R and help you can deal with your datasets with R. You will learn the fundamental concept of R for exploring and managing your data and visualizing the tidy data to communicate. After all the labs of the course, hope you would get some idea, what is R and what you can do once you get your data. : )

Introduction

What is R? And why? What can we do with R? R is a programming language for data science. There give some reasons for R that is especially important.

  1. Ease of learning
  2. Free and open-source
  3. Community of R
  4. Available to contributed or third party packages
R can do nearly anything when you work with your data, that is, you can use R to tackle a wide variety of data science challenges!

Installing R & RStudio

R software

Go to the homepage of R, https://www.r-project.org/, to download the R software. You’ll see this homepage as you go to the website: r-project.org. Click the “download R” and “0-Cloud” will be listed on the top of the mirrors. Hit it then “0-Cloud” will automatically get you to the nearest server by your location.

Rhomepage.png

In the page of “The Comprehensive R Archive Network,” please choose the one that matches to your operating system (OS). If you’re OS is Windows system, please click “base” to download R version 3.6.1. If you use the MAC OS X, please download the latest version one “R-3.6.1.pkg.” Then, you’ll go through the routine installing process…

RStudio

After you finished the installation of R, there are many integrated development environments (IDE) for R, here I suggest you use the cross-platform IDE, RStudio. The RStudio is free and available on https://www.rstudio.com/. As you go to their homepage, you may see something as following, then click the “Download RStudio.” In the following page you’ll have to choose the version of RStudio, just hit the Download of “RStudio Desktop” then download the installers that match to your OS.

RStudio.png