Sanah Yousaf, one of our interns talks about how she approached the task of learning R.
The current project I am working on as an intern at UK Data Service Census Support is creating Townsend deprivation scores with UK 2011 Census data. To allow UK Data Service Census Support users to produce their own Townsend deprivation scores, I used R to create an R script that produces the Townsend deprivation scores.
Initial experience with R
My first experience with R came about during my degree in a module concerning data analysis. R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. The software is free and allows for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display.
There are many packages available to use in R and I only had experience with using “R Commander” and “Deducer”. Both R Commander and Deducer are data analysis graphical user interfaces. Knowledge of coding in R is not particularly necessary when using R Commander and Deducer as menu options are available for easy navigation to get to what you need, whether that’s obtaining summary statistics of your data or creating graphs.
Perhaps it is fair to say that the R skills set I gained from my module as part of my degree was limited for the task at hand. Having said that, I was both eager and intrigued to learn more about R’s capabilities but I would have to do this quickly to enable me to produce an R script to create Townsend scores.
Useful resources to learn R
After a few Google searches, I found many resources that taught the basics of R. Some were great, others not so much. I particularly found R tutorials on YouTube useful as opposed to some websites that provided code for certain functions in R but lacked explanations. In addition, I often found myself on Stack Overflow which is an online community for developers to learn and share their knowledge of different programmes.
R Tutorials on YouTube
If you are new to R, I would recommend “MarinStatsLectures” channel on YouTube. The channel has tutorials ranging from how to import data into R that is of different formats to working with data in R. There are over 50 tutorials on the channel that are no longer than 10 minutes in length. The tutorials provided me with knowledge of different R commands and explained basic R concepts well.
R packages
The R package “Swirl” allows R users to interactively learn through the R console. This was useful because I could learn different R commands whilst practicing within R.
Google search
A simple Google search of “how to… in R?” will usually provide you with the answer you are looking for! You will most probably bump into other R users who have asked the same question on Stack Overflow.
Ask R for help in the R Console
The help() or ?() command typed into the R Console will bring up R Documentation in the help window in R Studio. For example, typing in ?matrix in the R Console should load up the R documentation below.
References
More about R: https://www.r-project.org/about.html
Downloading R: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/
Downloading R Studio: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
MarinStatsLectures Channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/marinstatlectures
More about Swirl in R: http://swirlstats.com/
Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r