Introduction to R (entry level)

R is a powerful and versatile computing environment, widely used by statisticians, economists, and political scientists.

R is developed by its users, and researchers from many different fields have contributed to making R into the powerful statistical program it is today. This means that users can write their own R code, or adjust existing code according to their needs, and share this code with others. But it also means that there are a vast number of statistical tools and methods implemented in R, and we will only scratch the surface of R’s vast potential in this short introductory course. However, I aim to provide you with enough knowledge of how R works to learn new techniques yourself, and/or follow other courses in R.

First session

I'll give an overview of how R works and which tools are available to facilitate working with R (in particular RStudio).

Then we will learn how to read in data from different formats (e.g., R’s data sets, SPSS and STATA files), how columns / variables get accessed and transformed, as well as how to save data.

We will also learn about objects such as matrices and vectors in R, which are necessary from time to time.

Second session

We start analysing the data from a statistical point of view.

First, we use simple summary commands and descriptive statistics standard to R, but also from additional R packages.

I will also provide an overview of R’s basic graphical abilities.

Final session

We'll discuss inference methods, i.e., how to implement regression analysis in R, and how to access various elements of the outputs.

We will also take a look at hypothesis tests.

By the end of the course, you should be a confident user of the basic functions of R.

You should also know how to get help, and thus how to learn for yourself techniques not covered during the course.

This course should enable you to follow other Winter School courses requiring only a basic knowledge of R. Please note, however, that it is not a specific introduction to follow-up courses that use R. Since many other instructors in the Winter School use R, we are unable to prepare all participants individually for their main courses. Instead, this course aims to introduce you to the general logic of the programming language, and give you a basic understanding of how R works.

R is a very comprehensive program, so you will need to put in additional time after the course to obtain a good working knowledge.

Basic statistical knowledge at undergrad level is desirable but not essential.

This course is for those with no experience in statistical (command line) software, which means that we probably won’t have time to cover absolutely all of the topics described below.

You should be familiar with, generally, finding files in your operating systems’ folders and extracting zip files.