Introduction to R

This course is based on the welcome-to-the-tidyverse materials.

It's an introduction to working with data and visualizations in R. Quarto is introduced for reporting.

The language R can be used for many purposes, such as data wrangling and cleaning, visualizations, interactive reports, modelling, forecasting, and machine learning. In this course, we'll focus on

• basic data wrangling,
• descriptive statistics,
• data visualizations, and
• reporting.

Aims

The aims of this course are in the following fields.

RStudio

1. Getting used to the RStudio GUI
2. Setting up an R project
3. Commenting and uncommenting

R

1. Knowing about general purposes and uses of the language
2. Knowing about value types
3. Knowing about functions
4. Assigning values to objects using <-
5. Using the pipe (|>)
6. Downloading and loading R packages

Data

1. Reading data into R
2. Having a look at data in the RStudio View mode
3. Merging two datasets
4. Using dplyr verbs: summarize, select, filter

Visualizations

1. Creating basic graphs with ggplot2
2. Getting used to aesthetics and geometries
3. Prettifying ggplot2 graphs with labs and themes

Quarto

1. Creating an own Quarto Markdown (.qmd) document
2. Changing the title, author, and date
3. Switching between Source and Visual view
4. Render ing a Quarto document
5. Creating code chunks
6. Writing simple markdown
7. Citing R packages
8. Using code chunks to read in data and create graphs, and describing those in markdown

Assignment

The final assignment is due by 31 December 2023. You will use the skills you've learned in this course to work on it.

Time plan

5 December

• Introduction to R, RStudio and Quarto
• Introduction to ggplot2
• Introduction to dplyr

6 December

• Create your own report with Quarto
• Prettify your graphs with theme_ and labs()