Research Guides: Data Science: Data Tutorials & Instructions

Introduction to R & RStudio

-- R is a programming language for data analysis

-- RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R

-- Strength of R is in its packages - Over 12,000 packages

-- RStudio is not R. But it facilitates the use of R

Introduction to R & RStudio This introduction mainly discusses how to import data into RStudio and explore the descriptive statistics of a given data set.

R script Step by step importing data into RStudio and exploring a given data set.

Start RStudio
Under the File menu at top left, click on New Project, choose New Directory, then New Project
As directory (or folder) name enter r-intro and create project as subdirecory of your desktop folder: ~/Desktop
Click on Create project
Under the Files tab on the bottom right of the screen, click on New Folder and create a folder named data within your newly created working directory (e.g., ~/r-intro/data)
On the main menu go to Files > New File > R Script (or use the shortcut Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + N) to open a new file
Save the empty script as r-intro-script.R in your working directory.

Your working directory should now look like in the following Figure:

You may need to install.packages(“pkgname”) before you can load them

E.g. library(readr), library(readxl)

File/Environment -> Import Dataset -> From text, Excel……-> Enter a URL/file path

Import the HRS data from a .csv file

# Import the HRS data from a .csv file

hrs = read.csv(“C:/HRS r1bmi.csv”, header=T, sep=“,”)

# Look at the first 6 cases to check the data

head(hrs)

# Look at the last 6 cases to check the data

tail(hrs)

Density plot and Q-Q plot to check normality
Box plot to detect outliers
Scatter plot to visualize the linear relationship between the dependent and independent variables