R course - The Basics

1. Concept

This seminar addresses everybody who is interested in learning R from scratch.

This workshop is also intended as a preparation for the advanced modules ? and courses in applied statistics and data analysis ? as well as data visualisation, which require some scripting skills.

There will be

a little theory
focus on technical aspects (not on interpretation)
time for questions and answers
hands-on training based on the requests you write in the comment field of the registration form. Feel free to approach us with your data

2. Organizational issues

Instructor: Guido Kraemer
Date: Wed and Thu, May 18-19, 2016
Starting time: 9.00 am
Place: Seminar room B0.004 (MPI-BGC)

3. Content of the course

Intro & Graphics - Wed, May 18 (9-12 am)

RStudio & R as a calculator, operations: +-*/, sum
Read and Write files
Data types: logical, numeric, character ...
Data structures: vectors, matrices, lists, data.frames, arrays
navigating the R universe: finding help, searching documentation, finding the right packages/functions for the right purpose.
High-level graphic functions
- plot, barplot, boxplot, contour, curve, hist, image, mosaicplot, pairs, persp
Low-level graphic functions
- abline, arrows, axis,grid, legend, lines, mtext, points, polygon, text, title
Saving graphics
- pdf, png ...

Basic statistics & Programming 101 - Wed, May 18 (1-4 pm)

Univariate descriptive statistics
- mean, median, quantile, range, min, max, var, sd
- plot, hist, boxplot
Multivariate descriptive statistics
- cov, cor
- linear regression: lm, summary, plot.lm
Conditions
- if, else
Loops and friends
- for, while, apply & co
Functions
Debugging (with Thomas Wutzler)
Processing of character strings
- match, grep, paste, strsplit, sub, gsub ...

Introduction to NetCDF - Thu, May 19 (9-12 am) In preparation for the skill course 'Applied statistics & data analysis'

Reading and writing

4. What you need to prepare

Bring a laptop and make sure that a recent version of R and R Studio is running on it.

You can download the most recent version here: http://www.r-project.org/
RStudio is a new open-source integrated development environment that runs on all platforms. It nicely combines console, script editor, working directory, plots etc. into a an uncluttered layout that you can easily navigate. You need to have R installed before you can use RStudio as a development environment.

Please also make sure that you can access the internet via WLAN (BGC-users, if you have a BGC-account; BGC-guests, if you don't have an account)

5. Material

This is the course material from previous years:

More R…

Here is a list of useful online resources to accelerate your progress.
Advanced R by Hadley Wickham
Help topics

6. Feedback

The survey gives feedback of 9 (out of 12) participants which was given by mid-June.
A retrospective assessment was requested after 10 months where 5 (out of 12) participants filled in the survey. Results are given here.
Statistics and statements should not be taken as an exhaustive or exclusive list.