401-6215-00L  Using R for Data Analysis and Graphics (Part I)

SemesterAutumn Semester 2019
LecturersM. Mächler
Periodicityyearly recurring course
Language of instructionEnglish


AbstractThe course provides the first part an introduction to the statistical software R (Link) for scientists. Topics covered are data generation and selection, graphical and basic statistical functions, creating simple functions, basic types of objects.
ObjectiveThe students will be able to use the software R for simple data analysis and graphics.
ContentThe course provides the first part of an introduction to the statistical software R for scientists. R is free software that contains a huge collection of functions with focus on statistics and graphics. If one wants to use R one has to learn the programming language R - on very rudimentary level. The course aims to facilitate this by providing a basic introduction to R.

Part I of the course covers the following topics:
- What is R?
- R Basics: reading and writing data from/to files, creating vectors & matrices, selecting elements of dataframes, vectors and matrices, arithmetics;
- Types of data: numeric, character, logical and categorical data, missing values;
- Simple (statistical) functions: summary, mean, var, etc., simple statistical tests;
- Writing simple functions;
- Introduction to graphics: scatter-, boxplots and other high-level plotting functions, embellishing plots by title, axis labels, etc., adding elements (lines, points) to existing plots.

The course focuses on practical work at the computer. We will make use of the graphical user interface RStudio: Link

Note: Part I of UsingR is complemented and extended by Part II, which is offered during the second part of the semester and which can be taken independently from Part I.
Lecture notesAn Introduction to R. Link
Prerequisites / NoticeThe course resources will be provided via the Moodle web learning platform.
As from FS 2019, subscribing via Mystudies should *automatically* make you
a student participant of the Moodle course of this lecture,
which is at

Link