Introduction to R Software course

• Start Date: November 05, 2013
• End Date: November 07, 2013
• City: Revelstoke BC
• Venue: Coast Hillcrest Hotel
• Instructor: Dr. Carl Schwarz

Course description

R is a free programming environment for data manipulation, statistical analyses and graphics that is becoming increasingly popular among ecologists. R is extremely powerful, can be readily extended to non-standard methods through the downloading of packages, and runs on a wide variety of platforms. Participants are expected to have a basic knowledge of statistics (as R is primarily a statistical package), but this was a course on how to use the software, not a course on statistical methods. The course is suitable for individuals who have never used R before as well as R-users looking to consolidate their understanding of the basics.

Our instructor was Dr. Carl Schwarz, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, at Simon Fraser University (http://www.stat.sfu.ca/~cschwarz).

Course outline

1. Starting with R

• using R as a calculator
• creating and using scripts in R
• basic objects in R; vectors, scalars
• basic functions in R, e.g. mean
• getting data into R
• saving information from R (plots and files)
• using the R help
• using Rstudio
• packages; installing, finding, etc.

2. Objects in R

• different data types
• different ways to index objects
• model objects; methods; classes

3. Plotting in R

• pen-on-paper paradigm
• ggplot package

4. Writing functions in R

5. Apply and other similar functions – never do loops in R again!

6. More advanced topics

• factors
• dealing with dates and times
• sorting/ ordering
• report writing
• debugging functions (trace, browser) etc.