2.6 Chapter summary
R is a statistical programming language and associated contributed packages. It is free to download and use. You code in R by writing scripts. Lines of R typically apply functions to objects. The objects belong to various different classes. Variables are objects in R, and a complete data set is an object of the class data.frame
. Functions include familiar statistical computations such as the mean and standard deviation, as well as many others. You can read data into R in multiple formats including .csv
and Rdata
. We investigated how to load in the data from a study, and obtain descriptive statistics and some quick plots.