R Basics

R basics

What is R? Very good question. I should thank myself for making you ask such a fantastic question! R is a free, powerful program that can be downloaded here: https://cran.r-project.org/ . By entering lines of code, this beautiful little program can virtually take care of all the statistical methods you could think of. Yep, that’s right, it can make additions, and even multiplications!

Look for yourself, try to type “(4*2+6)/3” (without quotes).

(4*2+6)/3
[1] 4.666667

… Impressive, isn’t it?

It can even take care of statistical tests like a chi square test, or more complex analyses such as generalized linear models or spatial statistics to name a few examples. How is it possible to have so many features implemented in such a tiny program? Simple, you rely on an ever growing community of researchers that will come up with “functions” bundled in “packages” to accomplish features that are not already present. Chances are that R will -at first- look like a glorified calculator. Hopefully, you’ll realize quickly how it can be so much more.

We’ll have the occasion here to first talk about how R works. We’ll then see how to play around with our data. From there, we’ll jump onto how to take care of statistical tests in R. After that? How to make all of that look pretty with graphs, what else?! And finally, we’ll see how we can personalize our R experience by writing our own functions.

No more blabla! Let’s dive into it!