1. An Introduction to the R Statistical Programming Language
Timothy J. Robinson
University of Wyoming
and
Doug Nychka
(add info)
Some material from NY Times, various Harry Potter websites,
Matthew Keller ( Revolution Analytics,
and Ian Westbrooke (NZDOC)

2. What is R? A. 18th letter of the alphabet
B. Rating for movies that suggests our kids should refrain from watching
C. Favorite pirate saying
Fastest growing statistical software package in the world
All of the above

3. Users of R
Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, Procter & Gamble, GE, Shell, Intercontinental Hotels, IBM, Hewlett-Packert, and many others
National laboratories (Los Alamos, Sandia, and others), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S.G.S., U.S. Department of Treasury, and many others
Growing number of academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world
In January 2009, estimated that over 2 million users of R worldwide

4. Where did it come from?
First appeared in 1996 when professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package
John Chambers, Bell Labs Researcher and currently a consultant for the Department of Statistics at Stanford, was an early champion of R. Chambers was part of the development team for SPLUS
Recently, Revolution Analytics has developed a platform for enabling R to handle massive data sets
NY Times 2009 suggested that R is rivaling the biggest stat software company of all, SAS…the response of SAS in the article:

6. Loading R Go to http://cran.r-project/
R for Windows screen, double-click “base”
Find, click on download R …save the executable file
Double-click the executable file to get into the installation wizard
When finished, you will have the R-icon for the particular version on your desktop

8. At http://cran.r-project.org/

14. After Double-Clicking on R icon

15. The R Prompt (>)
> This is the “R prompt.” It says R is ready to take your command
R as a calculator :
> 5+2
> 6^2
> sqrt(16)
Creating a data set:
> flowers <- c(1.2, 2.6, 3.4, 2.9,5.1)
> flowers
The above line tells R to print the data set “flowers”
Red denotes commands
Blue denotes output

16. Important Rules We created a variable
Variable names are case sensitive
No blanks in name
(can use _ or . to join words, but better not to use a blank between names)
Start with a letter (cap or lc)
Use of <- instead of =

17. Non-Numeric Data Enclose in quotes, single or double
Separate entries with comma
Example:
> names = c(“Tim”, “Dawn”, “Ian”, “Rosamund”, “Jay”)

18. Common Statistics Functions in R
function calculates this
mean ( ) mean
median ( ) median
mode ( ) mode
sd ( ) standard deviation
range ( ) range
IQR ( ) interquartile range
min ( ) minimum value
max ( ) maximum value
cor ( ) correlation
quantile ( ) percentile
length( ) sample size

19. R, And the Rise of the Best Software Money Can’t Buy
R programming language is a lot like magic... except instead of spells you have functions.

20. Fathom, MINITAB, SAS, etc. users are like muggles:
- can’t change their environment
- rely on algorithms which are ‘canned’
- rely on the output provided
- have to pay to constraining algorithms.

21. =
wizard
“R users are like wizards. They can rely on functions (spells) that have been developed for them by statistical researchers, but they can also create their own. They don’t have to pay for the use of them, and once experienced enough (like Dumbledore), they are almost unlimited in their ability to change their environment.” Matthew Keller

22. What Drives the Capability of R?
Installed packages/libraries
The base installation includes many packages/libraries but you can supplement the base installation with other packages/libraries

23. Just scroll down
to one of the many
USA sites

24. Learning R....

25. R-help listserve....

26. Rcmdr It is a package in R Advantages:
Click on the menu – similar to SPSS, Minitab, JMP
No need to memorize the R-functions
Save the script in your personnel directory and use it for future.
Good for non-statistical people or folks just starting use of R
Disadvantages:
No access for some functions
Limited access to the packages
Does not always help those with limited statistical skills enough

27. Installing Rcmdr
Choose
the Rcmdr
package
and click OK

28. Installing vs. Loading a Package/Library
‘Installing’ a package involves getting your machine to talk to a CRAN server and downloading the package/library from the CRAN site to your personal machine
Once the package is installed, we must load the package in order to activate it for our current session…this can be accomplished in one of two ways: Use the library( ) function Use the drop-down menu from the console window

32. You now have
a “point and
click” environment
within which to
operate