Introduction to R
2020-08-31
Introduction
In this induction session we introduce the statistical computer software R, which can be used to undertake statistical analyses. Statistical analyses are conducted using a computer because it is much quicker and makes fewer errors than a human. There are numerous programs that can be used for statistical analysis, including; Excel (limited), Minitab, R, SAS, SPSS, STATA. In this course we use R because it:
- is widely used by professional statisticians;
- can implement a wide range of simple and advanced statistical methods; and
- is free, so you can download it at home.
The one downside of using R is that the user-interface is not very user-friendly, so a user-interface called RStudio was developed. Thus, the software you will use is R with a user-interface called RStudio. In this introduction we will use R via RStudio, but you can use R on its own. Both these pieces of software are freely available to download from the following websites.
- R is available to download from http://www.r-project.org.
- RStudio is available to download from http://www.rstudio.org.
Note, R can be used without the RStudio user-interface, but you cannot use RStudio without having first installed R.