Welcome to class!

  1. Introductions
  2. Class overview
  3. Getting R up and running

About Us

John Muschelli

Assistant Scientist, Department of Biostatistics

PhD in Biostatistics, ScM in Biostatistics

Email: [email protected]

About Us

Andrew Jaffe

Lead Investigator, Lieber Institute for Brain Development

Associate Professor, Department of Mental Health, JHSPH

PhD in Epidemiology, MHS in Bioinformatics

Email: [email protected]

What is R?

  • R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics

  • R is the open source implementation of the S language, which was developed by Bell laboratories

  • R is both open source and open development

(source: http://www.r-project.org/)

Why R?

  • Powerful and flexible

  • Free (open source)

  • Extensive add-on software (packages)

  • Designed for statistical computing

  • High level language

Why not R?

  • Fairly steep learning curve

    • “Programming” oriented

    • Minimal interface

  • Little centralized support, relies on online community and package developers

  • Annoying to update

  • Slower, and more memory intensive, than the more traditional programming languages (C, Java, Perl, Python)

Introductions

What do you hope to get out of the class?

Why else to use R?

Course Website

Learning Objectives

  • Reading data into R
  • Recoding and manipulating data
  • Writing R functions and using add-on packages
  • Making exploratory plots
  • Understanding basic programming syntax
  • Performing basic statistical tests

Installing R

Collection of R packages

We have an R package called jhur that will make sure all the packages are installed.

You can just copy and paste the below code into your console - we’ll explain what it all means in the next day or two

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("muschellij2/jhur")

Note it may take ~5-10 minutes to run.

Useful (+Free) Resources

Website