Why this course?

Modern science requires modern statistical methods:

Statisticians develop new methods and often make them first available as packages in R.
No need to wait until these methods are programmed into SPSS.

What is R?

A short history

S was a programming language for statistics developed by John Chambers (Bell Labs) in the 1970s-80s.
It had two primary implementations:

  • S-plus (1988, commercial);
  • R (1993, GNU public license) by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka (Univ. of Auckland).

Now R is known as “a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.”

R

Current R developments are streamlined by non-profit organisation The R Project for Statistical Computing at https://www.r-project.org/.

The project supports a large and continuously growing community of users and package developers:

  • volunteer work (mostly by academics);
  • anyone can see the source code;
  • anyone can contribute (write code, report bugs, write documentation).

CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) at https://cloud.r-project.org/ is a central repository for R language interpreter and R packages.
It also contains manuals and mailing lists (well indexed on google).
Free download. New major version every year, minor versions in between.

RStudio

RStudio from https://rstudio.com/ is an open source integrated development environment for programming in R language.

It provides useful features to help in development of the R code and in organization of projects.

RStudio is not necessary to work with R programs, but it is highly recommended and is used in this course.


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