Introduction To R, Version 2

Introduction to R, version 2
Contents
Introduction 3
1 Starting out in R 5
1.1 Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2 Saving code in an R script . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.3 Vectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.4 Types of vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.5 Indexing vectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.6 Sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.7 Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2 Data frames 14
2.1 Setting up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.2 Loading data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.3 Exploring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.4 Indexing data frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.5 Columns are vectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.6 Logical indexing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.7 Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.8 Readability vs tidyness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.9 Sorting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.10 Joining data frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.11 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
1
CONTENTS
3 Plotting with ggplot2 30

3.1 Elements of a ggplot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.2 Further geoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.3 Highlighting subsets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.4 Fine-tuning a plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.5 Faceting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.6 Saving ggplots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4 Summarizing data 39
4.1 Summary functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.2 Missing values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.3 Grouped summaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.4 t-test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
5 Thinking in R 46
5.1 Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
5.2 Other types not covered here . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
5.3 Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
6 Next steps 49
6.1 Deepen your understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
6.2 Expand your vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
6.3 Join the community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2
Introduction
These are course notes for the “Introduction to R” course given by the Monash
Bioinformatics Platform1 for the Monash Data Fluency2 initiative. Our teaching
style is based on the style of The Carpentries3 . This is a new version of the
course focussing on the modern Tidyverse4 set of packages. We believe this is
currently the quickest route to being productive in R.
• PDF version for printing5

• ZIP of data files used in this workshop6
During the workshop we will be using the RStudio Cloud to use R over the web:
• RStudio Cloud7
You can also install R on your own computer. There are two things to download
and install:
• Download R8
• Download RStudio9
R is the language itself. RStudio provides a convenient environment in which

to use R, either on your local computer or on a server.
1 https://www.monash.edu/researchinfrastructure/bioinformatics
2 https://monashdatafluency.github.io/
3 https://carpentries.org/
4 https://www.tidyverse.org/
5 https://monashdatafluency.github.io/r-intro-2/r-intro-2.pdf
6 https://monashdatafluency.github.io/r-intro-2/r-intro-2-files.zip
7 https://rstudio.cloud/
8 https://cran.rstudio.com/
9 https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
3
CONTENTS
Source code
This book was created in R using the rmarkdown and bookdown packages!
• GitHub page10
Authors and copyright
This course is developed for the Monash Bioinformatics Platform by Paul Har-
rison.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-4: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

International License11 . The attribution is “Monash Bioinformatics Platform”
if copying or modifying these notes.
Data files are derived from Gapminder, which has a CC BY-4 license. The
attribution is “Free data from www.gapminder.org”. The data is given here in
a form designed to teach various points about the R language. Refer to the
Gapminder site12 for the original form of the data if using it for other uses.
10 https://github.com/MonashDataFluency/r-intro-2
11 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
12 https://www.gapminder.org
4
Chapter 1
Starting out in R
R is both a programming language and an interactive environment for data

exploration and statistics. Today we will be concentrating on R as an interactive
environment.
Working with R is primarily text-based. The basic mode of use for R is that
the user types in a command in the R language and presses enter, and then R
computes and displays the result.
We will be working in RStudio1 . The easiest way to get started is to go to
RStudio Cloud2 and create a new project. Monash staff and students can log
in using their Monash Google account.
The main way of working with R is the console, where you enter commands and
view results. RStudio surrounds this with various conveniences. In addition to
the console panel, RStudio provides panels containing:
• A text editor, where R commands can be recorded for future reference.

• A history of commands that have been typed on the console.
• An “environment” pane with a list of variables, which contain values that
R has been told to save from previous commands.
• A file manager.
• Help on the functions available in R.
• A panel to show plots.
1 https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
2 https://rstudio.cloud/
5
CHAPTER 1. STARTING OUT IN R
Open RStudio, click on the “Console” pane, type 1+1 and press enter. R displays
the result of the calculation. In this document, we will show such an interaction
with R as below.
1+1
## [1] 2
+ is called an operator. R has the operators you would expect for for basic
mathematics: + - * / ˆ. It also has operators that do more obscure things.
* has higher precedence than +. We can use brackets if necessary ( ). Try
1+2*3 and (1+2)*3.
Spaces can be used to make code easier to read.
We can compare with == < > <= >=. This produces a logical value, TRUE or
FALSE. Note the double equals, ==, for equality comparison.
2 * 2 == 4
## [1] TRUE
There are also character strings such as "string". A character string must be
surrounded by either single or double quotes.
1.1 Variables
A variable is a name for a value. We can create a new variable by assigning a
value to it using <-.
6
width <- 5
RStudio helpfully shows us the variable in the “Environment” pane. We can

also print it by typing the name of the variable and hitting enter. In general, R
will print to the console any object returned by a function or operation unless
we assign it to a variable.
width
## [1] 5
Examples of valid variables names: hello, subject_id, subject.ID, x42.

Spaces aren’t ok inside variable names. Dots (.) are ok in R, unlike in many
other languages. Numbers are ok, except as the first character. Punctuation is
not allowed, with two exceptions: _ and ..
We can do arithmetic with the variable:
# Area of a square
width * width
## [1] 25
and even save the result in another variable:
# Save area in "area" variable

area <- width * width
We can also change a variable’s value by assigning it a new value:
width <- 10
width
## [1] 10
area
## [1] 25
Notice that the value of area we calculated earlier hasn’t been updated. As-
signing a new value to one variable does not change the values of other variables.
This is different to a spreadsheet, but usual for programming languages.
7
1.2 Saving code in an R script

Once we’ve created a few variables, it becomes important to record how they
were calculated so we can reproduce them later.
The usual workflow is to save your code in an R script (“.R file”). Go to
“File/New File/R Script” to create a new R script. Code in your R script can
be sent to the console by selecting it or placing the cursor on the correct line,
and then pressing Control-Enter (Command-Enter on a Mac).
Tip
Add comments to code, using lines starting with the # character. This makes it
easier for others to follow what the code is doing (and also for us the next time
we come back to it).
Challenge: using variables
1. Re-write this calculation so that it doesn’t use variables:
a <- 4*20
b <- 7
a+b
2. Re-write this calcuation over multiple lines, using a variable:
2*2+2*2+2*2
1.3 Vectors
A vector of numbers is a collection of numbers. “Vector” means different things
in different fields (mathematics, geometry, biology), but in R it is a fancy name
for a collection of numbers. We call the individual numbers elements of the
vector.
We can make vectors with c( ), for example c(1,2,3). c means “combine”. R
is obsesssed with vectors, in R even single numbers are vectors of length one.
Many things that can be done with a single number can also be done with a
vector. For example arithmetic can be done on vectors as it can be on single
numbers.
myvec <- c(10,20,30,40,50)

myvec
## [1] 10 20 30 40 50
8
myvec + 1
## [1] 11 21 31 41 51
myvec + myvec
## [1] 20 40 60 80 100
length(myvec)
## [1] 5
c(60, myvec)
## [1] 60 10 20 30 40 50
c(myvec, myvec)
## [1] 10 20 30 40 50 10 20 30 40 50
When we talk about the length of a vector, we are talking about the number of
numbers in the vector.
1.4 Types of vector

We will also encounter vectors of character strings, for example "hello" or
c("hello","world"). Also we will encounter “logical” vectors, which contain
TRUE and FALSE values. R also has “factors”, which are categorical vectors, and
behave much like character vectors (think the factors in an experiment).
Challenge: mixing types
Sometimes the best way to understand R is to try some examples and see what
it does.
What happens when you try to make a vector containing different types, using
c( )? Make a vector with some numbers, and some words (eg. character strings
like "test", or "hello").
Why does the output show the numbers surrounded by quotes " " like character
strings are?
9
Because vectors can only contain one type of thing, R chooses a lowest common
denominator type of vector, a type that can contain everything we are trying to
put in it. A different language might stop with an error, but R tries to soldier
on as best it can. A number can be represented as a character string, but a
character string can not be represented as a number, so when we try to put
both in the same vector R converts everything to a character string.
1.5 Indexing vectors

Access elements of a vector with [ ], for example myvec[1] to get the first
element. You can also assign to a specific element of a vector.
myvec[1]
## [1] 10
myvec[2]
## [1] 20
myvec[2] <- 5
myvec
## [1] 10 5 30 40 50
Can we use a vector to index another vector? Yes!
myind <- c(4,3,2)

myvec[myind]
## [1] 40 30 5
We could equivalently have written:
myvec[c(4,3,2)]
## [1] 40 30 5
Challenge: indexing
We can create and index character vectors as well. A cafe is using R to create
their menu.
10
items <- c("spam", "eggs", "beans", "bacon", "sausage")
1. What does items[-3] produce? Based on what you find, use indexing to
create a version of items without "spam".
2. Use indexing to create a vector containing spam, eggs, sausage, spam, and
spam.
3. Add a new item, “lobster”, to items.
1.6 Sequences
Another way to create a vector is with ::
1:10
## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This can be useful when combined with indexing:
items[1:4]
## [1] "spam" "eggs" "beans" "bacon"
Sequences are useful for other things, such as a starting point for calculations:
x <- 1:10
x*x
## [1] 1 4 9 16 25 36 49 64 81 100
plot(x, x*x)
100
60
x*x
20
0
2 4 6 8 10
11
1.7 Functions
Functions are the things that do all the work for us in R: calculate, manipulate
data, read and write to files, produce plots. R has many built in functions and
we will also be loading more specialized functions from “packages”.
We’ve already seen several functions: c( ), length( ), and plot( ). Let’s
now have a look at sum( ).
sum(myvec)
## [1] 135
We called the function sum with the argument myvec, and it returned the value
135. We can get help on how to use sum with:
?sum
Some functions take more than one argument. Let’s look at the function rep,
which means “repeat”, and which can take a variety of different arguments. In
the simplest case, it takes a value and the number of times to repeat that value.
rep(42, 10)
## [1] 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42
As with many functions in R—which is obsessed with vectors—the thing to be

repeated can be a vector with multiple elements.
rep(c(1,2,3), 10)
## [1] 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3
So far we have used positional arguments, where R determines which argument

is which by the order in which they are given. We can also give arguments by
name. For example, the above is equivalent to
rep(c(1,2,3), times=10)
## [1] 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3
rep(x=c(1,2,3), 10)
## [1] 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3
12
rep(times=10, x=c(1,2,3))
## [1] 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3
Arguments can have default values, and a function may have many different pos-
sible arguments that make it do obscure things. For example, rep can also take
an argument each=. It’s typical for a function to be invoked with some number
of positional arguments, which are always given, plus some less commonly used
arguments, typically given by name.
rep(c(1,2,3), each=3)
## [1] 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3
rep(c(1,2,3), each=3, times=5)
## [1] 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 1 1
## [39] 1 2 2 2 3 3 3
Challenge: using functions
1. Use sum to sum from 1 to 10,000.
2. Look at the documentation for the seq function. What does seq do? Give
an example of using seq with either the by or length.out argument.
13
Chapter 2
Data frames
Data frame is R’s name for tabular data. We generally want each row in a data
frame to represent a unit of observation, and each column to contain a different
type of information about the units of observation. Tabular data in this form
is called “tidy data”1 .
Today we will be using a collection of modern packages collectively known as
the Tidyverse2 . R and its predecessor S have a history dating back to 1976. The
Tidyverse fixes some dubious design decisions baked into “base R”, including
having its own slightly improved form of data frame, which is called a tibble.
Sticking to the Tidyverse where possible is generally safer, Tidyverse packages
are more willing to generate errors rather than ignore problems.
2.1 Setting up
Our first step is to download the files we need and to install the Tidyverse. This
is the one step where we ask you to copy and paste some code:
# Download files for this workshop

download.file(
"https://monashdatafluency.github.io/r-intro-2/r-intro-2-files.zip",
destfile="r-intro-2-files.zip")
unzip("r-intro-2-files.zip")
# Install Tidyverse
install.packages("tidyverse")
If using RStudio Cloud, you might need to switch to R version 3.5.3 to suc-
cessfully install Tidyverse. Use the drop-down in the top right corner of the
page.
1 http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html
2 https://www.tidyverse.org/
14
CHAPTER 2. DATA FRAMES
People also sometimes have problems installing all the packages in Tidyverse
on Windows machines. If you run into problems you may have more success
installing individual packages.
install.packages(c("dplyr","readr","tidyr","ggplot2"))
We need to load the tidyverse package in order to use it.
library(tidyverse)
# OR
library(dplyr)
library(readr)
library(tidyr)
library(ggplot2)
The tidyverse package loads various other packages, setting up a modern R

environment. In this section we will be using functions from the dplyr, readr
and tidyr packages.
R is a language with mini-languages within it that solve specific problem do-
mains. dplyr is such a mini-language, a set of “verbs” (functions) that work
well together. dplyr, with the help of tidyr for some more complex operations,
provides a way to perform most manipulations on a data frame that you might
need.
2.2 Loading data

We will use the read_csv function from readr to load a data set. (See also
read.csv in base R.) CSV stands for Comma Separated Values, and is a text
format used to store tabular data. The first few lines of the file we are loading
are shown below. Conventionally the first line contains column headings.
name,region,oecd,g77,lat,long,income2017
Afghanistan,asia,FALSE,TRUE,33,66,low
Albania,europe,FALSE,FALSE,41,20,upper_mid
Algeria,africa,FALSE,TRUE,28,3,upper_mid
Andorra,europe,FALSE,FALSE,42.50779,1.52109,high
Angola,africa,FALSE,TRUE,-12.5,18.5,lower_mid
geo <- read_csv("r-intro-2-files/geo.csv")
## Parsed with column specification:

## cols(
## name = col_character(),
## region = col_character(),
## oecd = col_logical(),
15
## g77 = col_logical(),
## lat = col_double(),
## long = col_double(),
## income2017 = col_character()
## )
geo
## # A tibble: 196 x 7
## name region oecd g77 lat long income2017
## <chr> <chr> <lgl> <lgl> <dbl> <dbl> <chr>
## 1 Afghanistan asia FALSE TRUE 33 66 low
## 2 Albania europe FALSE FALSE 41 20 upper_mid
## 3 Algeria africa FALSE TRUE 28 3 upper_mid
## 4 Andorra europe FALSE FALSE 42.5 1.52 high
## 5 Angola africa FALSE TRUE -12.5 18.5 lower_mid
## 6 Antigua and Barbuda americas FALSE TRUE 17.0 -61.8 high
## 7 Argentina americas FALSE TRUE -34 -64 upper_mid
## 8 Armenia europe FALSE FALSE 40.2 45 lower_mid
## 9 Australia asia TRUE FALSE -25 135 high
## 10 Austria europe TRUE FALSE 47.3 13.3 high
## # ... with 186 more rows
read_csv has guessed the type of data each column holds:
• <chr> - character strings

• <dbl> - numerical values. Technically these are “doubles”, which is a way
of storing numbers with 15 digits precision.
• <lgl> - logical values, TRUE or FALSE.
We will also encounter:
• <int> - integers, a fancy name for whole numbers.

• <fct> - factors, categorical data. We will get to this shortly.
You can also see this data frame referring to itself as “a tibble”. This is the
Tidyverse’s improved form of data frame. Tibbles present themselves more
conveniently than base R data frames. Base R data frames don’t show the type
of each column, and output every row when you try to view them.
Tip
A data frame can also be created from vectors, with the tibble function. (See
also data.frame in base R.) For example:
16
tibble(foo=c(10,20,30), bar=c("a","b","c"))
## # A tibble: 3 x 2
## foo bar
## <dbl> <chr>
## 1 10 a
## 2 20 b
## 3 30 c
The argument names become column names in the data frame.
Tip
The path to the file on our server is "r-intro-2-files/geo.csv". This says,

starting from your working directory, look in the directory r-intro-2-files
for the file geo.csv. The steps in the path are separated by /. Your working
directory is shown at the top of the console pane. The path needed might be
different on your own computer, depending where you downloaded the file.
One way to work out the correct path is to find the file in the file browser pane,
click on it and select “Import Dataset. . . ”.
2.3 Exploring
The View function gives us a spreadsheet-like view of the data frame.
View(geo)
print with the n argument can be used to show more than the first 10 rows on
the console.
print(geo, n=200)
We can extract details of the data frame with further functions:
17
nrow(geo)
## [1] 196
ncol(geo)
## [1] 7
colnames(geo)
## [1] "name" "region" "oecd" "g77" "lat"

## [6] "long" "income2017"
summary(geo)
## name region oecd g77

## Length:196 Length:196 Mode :logical Mode :logical
## Class :character Class :character FALSE:165 FALSE:65
## Mode :character Mode :character TRUE :31 TRUE :131
##
##
##
## lat long income2017
## Min. :-42.00 Min. :-175.000 Length:196
## 1st Qu.: 4.00 1st Qu.: -5.625 Class :character
## Median : 17.42 Median : 21.875 Mode :character
## Mean : 19.03 Mean : 23.004
## 3rd Qu.: 39.82 3rd Qu.: 51.892
## Max. : 65.00 Max. : 179.145
2.4 Indexing data frames

Data frames can be subset using [row,column] syntax.
geo[4,2]
## region
## <chr>
## 1 europe
Note that while this is a single value, it is still wrapped in a data frame. (This
is a behaviour specific to Tidyverse data frames.) More on this in a moment.
Columns can be given by name.
18
geo[4,"region"]
## region
## <chr>
## 1 europe
The column or row may be omitted, thereby retrieving the entire row or column.
geo[4,]
geo[,"region"]
## # A tibble: 196 x 1
## region
## <chr>
## 1 asia
## 2 europe
## 3 africa
## 4 europe
## 5 africa
## 6 americas
## 7 americas
## 8 europe
## 9 asia
## 10 europe
Multiple rows or columns may be retrieved using a vector.
rows_wanted <- c(1,3,5)

geo[rows_wanted,]
Vector indexing can also be written on a single line.
19
geo[c(1,3,5),]
geo[1:7,]
## 2 Albania europe FALSE FALSE 41 20 upper_mid
## 6 Antigua and Barbuda americas FALSE TRUE 17.0 -61.8 high
2.5 Columns are vectors

Ok, so how do we actually get data out of a data frame?
Under the hood, a data frame is a list of column vectors. We can use $ to
retrieve columns. Occasionally it is also useful to use [[ ]] to retrieve columns,
for example if the column name we want is stored in a variable.
head( geo$region )
## [1] "asia" "europe" "africa" "europe" "africa" "americas"
head( geo[["region"]] )
## [1] "asia" "europe" "africa" "europe" "africa" "americas"
To get the “region” value of the 4th row as above, but unwrapped, we can use:
geo$region[4]
## [1] "europe"
For example, to plot the longitudes and latitudes we could use:
20
plot(geo$long, geo$lat)
60
geo$lat
0 20
−40
−150 −100 −50 0 50 100 150
geo$long
2.6 Logical indexing

A method of indexing that we haven’t discussed yet is logical indexing. Instead
of specifying the row number or numbers that we want, we can give a logical
vector which is TRUE for the rows we want and FALSE otherwise. This can also
be used with vectors.
We will first do this in a slightly verbose way in order to understand it, then
learn a more concise way to do this using the dplyr package.
Southern countries have latitude less than zero.
is_southern <- geo$lat < 0
head(is_southern)
## [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE
sum(is_southern)
## [1] 40
sum treats TRUE as 1 and FALSE as 0, so it tells us the number of TRUE

elements in the vector.
We can use this logical vector to get the southern countries from geo:
geo[is_southern,]
21
## # A tibble: 40 x 7
## 4 Bolivia americas FALSE TRUE -17 -65 lower_mid
## 5 Botswana africa FALSE TRUE -22 24 upper_mid
## 6 Brazil americas FALSE TRUE -10 -55 upper_mid
## 7 Burundi africa FALSE TRUE -3.5 30 low
## 8 Chile americas TRUE TRUE -33.5 -70.6 high
## 9 Comoros africa FALSE TRUE -12.2 44.4 low
## 10 Congo, Dem. Rep. africa FALSE TRUE -2.5 23.5 low
Comparison operators available are:
• x == y – “equal to”
• x != y – “not equal to”
• x < y – “less than”
• x > y – “greater than”
• x <= y – “less than or equal to”
• x >= y – “greater than or equal to”
More complicated conditions can be constructed using logical operators:
• a & b – “and”, TRUE only if both a and b are TRUE.

• a | b – “or”, TRUE if either a or b or both are TRUE.
• ! a – “not” , TRUE if a is FALSE, and FALSE if a is TRUE.
The oecd column of geo tells which countries are in the Organisation for Eco-
nomic Co-operation and Development, and the g77 column tells which countries
are in the Group of 77 (an alliance of developing nations). We could see which
OECD countries are in the southern hemisphere with:
southern_oecd <- is_southern & geo$oecd
geo[southern_oecd,]
## 2 Chile americas TRUE TRUE -33.5 -70.6 high
## 3 New Zealand asia TRUE FALSE -42 174 high
is_southern seems like it should be kept within our geo data frame for future
use. We can add it as a new column of the data frame with:
22
geo$southern <- is_southern
geo
## # A tibble: 196 x 8
## name region oecd g77 lat long income2017 southern
## <chr> <chr> <lgl> <lgl> <dbl> <dbl> <chr> <lgl>
## 1 Afghanistan asia FALSE TRUE 33 66 low FALSE
## 2 Albania europe FALSE FALSE 41 20 upper_mid FALSE
## 3 Algeria africa FALSE TRUE 28 3 upper_mid FALSE
## 4 Andorra europe FALSE FALSE 42.5 1.52 high FALSE
## 5 Angola africa FALSE TRUE -12.5 18.5 lower_mid TRUE
## 6 Antigua and Barbuda americas FALSE TRUE 17.0 -61.8 high FALSE
## 7 Argentina americas FALSE TRUE -34 -64 upper_mid TRUE
## 8 Armenia europe FALSE FALSE 40.2 45 lower_mid FALSE
## 9 Australia asia TRUE FALSE -25 135 high TRUE
## 10 Austria europe TRUE FALSE 47.3 13.3 high FALSE
Challenge: logical indexing

1. Which country is in both the OECD and the G77?
2. Which countries are in neither the OECD nor the G77?
3. Which countries are in the Americas? These have longitudes between -150
and -40.
2.6.1 A dplyr shorthand

The above method is a little laborious. We have to keep mentioning the name
of the data frame, and there is a lot of punctuation to keep track of. dplyr
provides a slightly magical function called filter which lets us write more
concisely. For example:
filter(geo, lat < 0 & oecd)
## <chr> <chr> <lgl> <lgl> <dbl> <dbl> <chr> <lgl>
## 2 Chile americas TRUE TRUE -33.5 -70.6 high TRUE
## 3 New Zealand asia TRUE FALSE -42 174 high TRUE
In the second argument, we are able to refer to columns of the data frame
as though they were variables. The code is beautiful, but also opaque. It’s
important to understand that under the hood we are creating and combining
logical vectors.
23
2.7 Factors
The count function from dplyr can help us understand the contents of some of
the columns in geo. count is also magical, we can refer to columns of the data
frame directly in the arguments to count.
count(geo, region)
## region n
## <chr> <int>
## 1 africa 54
## 2 americas 35
## 3 asia 59
## 4 europe 48
count(geo, income2017)
## income2017 n
## <chr> <int>
## 1 high 58
## 2 low 31
## 3 lower_mid 52
## 4 upper_mid 55
One annoyance here is that the different categories in income2017 aren’t in a

sensible order. This comes up quite often, for example when sorting or plotting
categorical data. R’s solution is a further type of vector called a factor (think
a factor of an experimental design). A factor holds categorical data, and has
an associated ordered set of levels. It is otherwise quite similar to a character
vector.
Any sort of vector can be converted to a factor using the factor function. This
function defaults to placing the levels in alphabetical order, but takes a levels
argument that can override this.
head( factor(geo$income2017, levels=c("low","lower_mid","upper_mid","high")) )
## [1] low upper_mid upper_mid high lower_mid high

## Levels: low lower_mid upper_mid high
We should modify the income2017 column of the geo table in order to use this:
geo$income2017 <- factor(geo$income2017, levels=c("low","lower_mid","upper_mid","high"))
count now produces the desired order of output:
24
count(geo, income2017)
## income2017 n
## <fct> <int>
## 1 low 31
## 2 lower_mid 52
## 3 upper_mid 55
## 4 high 58
When plot is given a factor, it shows a bar plot:
plot(geo$income2017)
50
30
0 10
low lower_mid upper_mid high
When given two factors, it shows a mosaic plot:
plot(geo$income2017, factor(geo$oecd))
TRUE
0.8
y
0.4
FALSE
0.0
low lower_mid upper_mid high
Similarly we can count two categorical columns at once.
25
count(geo, income2017, oecd)
## income2017 oecd n
## <fct> <lgl> <int>
## 1 low FALSE 31
## 2 lower_mid FALSE 52
## 3 upper_mid FALSE 53
## 4 upper_mid TRUE 2
## 5 high FALSE 29
## 6 high TRUE 29
2.8 Readability vs tidyness

The counts we obtained counting income2017 vs oecd were properly tidy in
the sense of containing a single unit of observation per row. However to view
the data, it would be more convenient to have income as columns and OECD
membership as rows. We can use the pivot_wider function from tidyr to
achieve this. (This is also sometimes also called a “cast” or a “spread”.)
counts <- count(geo, income2017, oecd)

pivot_wider(counts, names_from=income2017, values_from=n)
## oecd low lower_mid upper_mid high
## <lgl> <int> <int> <int> <int>
## 1 FALSE 31 52 53 29
## 2 TRUE NA NA 2 29
We could further specify values_fill=list(n=0) to fill in the NA values with

0.
Tip
Tidying is often the first step when exploring a data-set. The tidyr3 package
contains a number of useful functions that help tidy (or un-tidy!) data. We’ve
just seen pivot_wider which spreads two columns into multiple columns. The
inverse of pivot_wider is pivot_longer, which gathers multiple columns into
two columns: a column of column names, and a column of values. pivot_longer
is often the first step when tidying a dataset you have received from the wild.
(This is sometimes also called a “melt” or a “gather”.)
3 http://tidyr.tidyverse.org/
26
Challenge: counting
Investigate how many OECD and non-OECD nations come from the northern
and southern hemispheres.
1. Using count.
2. By making a mosaic plot.
Remember you may need to convert columns to factors for plot to work, and
that a southern column could be added to geo with:
geo$southern <- geo$lat < 0
2.9 Sorting
Data frames can be sorted using the arrange function in dplyr.
arrange(geo, lat)
## # A tibble: 196 x 8
## <chr> <chr> <lgl> <lgl> <dbl> <dbl> <fct> <lgl>
## 1 New Zealand asia TRUE FALSE -42 174 high TRUE
## 2 Argentina americas FALSE TRUE -34 -64 upper_mid TRUE
## 3 Chile americas TRUE TRUE -33.5 -70.6 high TRUE
## 4 Uruguay americas FALSE TRUE -33 -56 high TRUE
## 5 Lesotho africa FALSE TRUE -29.5 28.2 lower_mid TRUE
## 6 South Africa africa FALSE TRUE -29 24 upper_mid TRUE
## 7 Swaziland africa FALSE TRUE -26.5 31.5 lower_mid TRUE
## 9 Paraguay americas FALSE TRUE -23.3 -58 upper_mid TRUE
## 10 Botswana africa FALSE TRUE -22 24 upper_mid TRUE
Numeric columns are sorted in numeric order. Character columns will be sorted
in alphabetical order. Factor columns are sorted in order of their levels. The
desc helper function can be used to sort in descending order.
arrange(geo, desc(name))
## # A tibble: 196 x 8
## <chr> <chr> <lgl> <lgl> <dbl> <dbl> <fct> <lgl>
## 1 Zimbabwe africa FALSE TRUE -19 29.8 low TRUE
## 2 Zambia africa FALSE TRUE -14.3 28.5 lower_mid TRUE
## 3 Yemen asia FALSE TRUE 15.5 47.5 lower_mid FALSE
27
## 4 Vietnam asia FALSE TRUE 16.2 108. lower_mid FALSE

## 5 Venezuela americas FALSE TRUE 8 -66 upper_mid FALSE
## 6 Vanuatu asia FALSE TRUE -16 167 lower_mid TRUE
## 7 Uzbekistan asia FALSE FALSE 41.7 63.8 lower_mid FALSE
## 8 Uruguay americas FALSE TRUE -33 -56 high TRUE
## 9 United States americas TRUE FALSE 39.8 -98.5 high FALSE
## 10 United Kingdom europe TRUE FALSE 54.8 -2.70 high FALSE
2.10 Joining data frames

Let’s move on to a larger data set. This is from the Gapminder4 project and
contains information about countries over time.
gap <- read_csv("r-intro-2-files/gap-minder.csv")

gap
## # A tibble: 4,312 x 5
## name year population gdp_percap life_exp
## <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 Afghanistan 1800 3280000 603 28.2
## 2 Albania 1800 410445 667 35.4
## 3 Algeria 1800 2503218 715 28.8
## 4 Andorra 1800 2654 1197 NA
## 5 Angola 1800 1567028 618 27.0
## 6 Antigua and Barbuda 1800 37000 757 33.5
## 7 Argentina 1800 534000 1507 33.2
## 8 Armenia 1800 413326 514 34
## 9 Australia 1800 351014 814 34.0
## 10 Austria 1800 3205587 1847 34.4
## # ... with 4,302 more rows
Quiz
What is the unit of observation in this new data frame?
It would be useful to have general information about countries from geo available
as columns when we use this data frame. gap and geo share a column called
name which can be used to match rows from one to the other.
gap_geo <- left_join(gap, geo, by="name")

gap_geo
4 https://www.gapminder.org
28
## # A tibble: 4,312 x 12
## name year population gdp_percap life_exp region oecd g77 lat long
## <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <chr> <lgl> <lgl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 Afgh~ 1800 3280000 603 28.2 asia FALSE TRUE 33 66
## 2 Alba~ 1800 410445 667 35.4 europe FALSE FALSE 41 20
## 3 Alge~ 1800 2503218 715 28.8 africa FALSE TRUE 28 3
## 4 Ando~ 1800 2654 1197 NA europe FALSE FALSE 42.5 1.52
## 5 Ango~ 1800 1567028 618 27.0 africa FALSE TRUE -12.5 18.5
## 6 Anti~ 1800 37000 757 33.5 ameri~ FALSE TRUE 17.0 -61.8
## 7 Arge~ 1800 534000 1507 33.2 ameri~ FALSE TRUE -34 -64
## 8 Arme~ 1800 413326 514 34 europe FALSE FALSE 40.2 45
## 9 Aust~ 1800 351014 814 34.0 asia TRUE FALSE -25 135
## 10 Aust~ 1800 3205587 1847 34.4 europe TRUE FALSE 47.3 13.3
## # ... with 4,302 more rows, and 2 more variables: income2017 <fct>,
## # southern <lgl>
The output contains all ways of pairing up rows by name. In this case each row
of geo pairs up with multiple rows of gap.
The “left” in “left join” refers to how rows that can’t be paired up are handled.
left_join keeps all rows from the first data frame but not the second. This is
a good default when the intent is to attaching some extra information to a data
frame. inner_join discard all rows that can’t be paired up. full_join keeps
all rows from both data frames.
2.11 Further reading

We’ve covered the fundamentals of dplyr and data frames, but there is much
more to learn. Notably, we haven’t covered the use of the pipe %>% to chain
dplyr verbs together. The “R for Data Science” book5 is an excellent source to
learn more. The Monash Data Fluency “Programming and Tidy data analysis
in R” course6 also covers this.
5 http://r4ds.had.co.nz/
6 https://monashdatafluency.github.io/r-progtidy/
29
Chapter 3
Plotting with ggplot2
We already saw some of R’s built in plotting facilities with the function plot.
A more recent and much more powerful plotting library is ggplot2. ggplot2
is another mini-language within R, a language for creating plots. It implements
ideas from a book called “The Grammar of Graphics”1 . The syntax can be a
little strange, but there are plenty of examples in the online documentation2 .
ggplot2 is part of the Tidyverse, so loading the tidyverse package will load
ggplot2.
library(tidyverse)
We continue with the Gapminder dataset, which we loaded with:

3.1 Elements of a ggplot

Producing a plot with ggplot2, we must give three things:
1. A data frame containing our data.

2. How the columns of the data frame can be translated into positions, colors,
sizes, and shapes of graphical elements (“aesthetics”).
3. The actual graphical elements to display (“geometric objects”).
Let’s make our first ggplot.
1 https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Computing/dp/0387245448
2 http://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/
30
CHAPTER 3. PLOTTING WITH GGPLOT2
ggplot(gap_geo, aes(x=year, y=life_exp)) +

geom_point()
80
60
life_exp
40
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

year
The call to ggplot and aes sets up the basics of how we are going to represent
the various columns of the data frame. aes defines the “aesthetics”, which is how
columns of the data frame map to graphical attributes such as x and y position,
color, size, etc. aes is another example of magic “non-standard evaluation”,
arguments to aes may refer to columns of the data frame directly. We then
literally add layers of graphics (“geoms”) to this.
Further aesthetics can be used. Any aesthetic can be either numeric or categor-
ical, an appropriate scale will be used.
ggplot(gap_geo, aes(x=year, y=life_exp, color=region, size=population)) +

geom_point()
80 population
5e+08
60 1e+09
life_exp
region
40
africa
americas
20 asia
europe
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

year
31
3.1.1 Challenge: make a ggplot
This R code will get the data from the year 2010:
gap2010 <- filter(gap_geo, year == 2010)
Create a ggplot of this with:
• gdp_percap as x.
• life_exp as y.
• population as the size.
• region as the color.
3.2 Further geoms

To draw lines, we need to use a “group” aesthetic.
ggplot(gap_geo, aes(x=year, y=life_exp, group=name, color=region)) +

geom_line()
80
60 region
africa
life_exp
americas
40
asia
europe
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

year
A wide variety of geoms are available. Here we show Tukey box-plots. Note
again the use of the “group” aesthetic, without this ggplot will just show one
big box-plot.
ggplot(gap_geo, aes(x=year, y=life_exp, group=year)) +

geom_boxplot()
32
80
60
life_exp
40
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

year
geom_smooth can be used to show trends.

geom_point() +
geom_smooth()
## ‘geom_smooth()‘ using method = ’gam’ and formula ’y ~ s(x, bs = "cs")’
80
60
life_exp
40
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

year
Aesthetics can be specified globally in ggplot, or as the first argument to indi-

vidual geoms. Here, the “group” is applied only to draw the lines, and “color”
is used to produce multiple trend lines:

geom_line(aes(group=name)) +
geom_smooth(aes(color=oecd))
33
## ‘geom_smooth()‘ using method = ’gam’ and formula ’y ~ s(x, bs = "cs")’
80
60
oecd
life_exp
FALSE
40
TRUE
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

year
3.3 Highlighting subsets

Geoms can be added that use a different data frame, using the data= argument.
gap_australia <- filter(gap_geo, name == "Australia")
ggplot(gap_geo, aes(x=year, y=life_exp, group=name)) +

geom_line() +
geom_line(data=gap_australia, color="red", size=2)
80
60
life_exp
40
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

year
Notice also that the second geom_line has some further arguments controlling
its appearance. These are not aesthetics, they are not a mapping of data to
appearance, but rather a direct specification of the appearance. There isn’t an
associated scale as when color was an aesthetic.
34
3.4 Fine-tuning a plot

Adding labs to a ggplot adjusts the labels given to the axes and legends. A
plot title can also be specified.

geom_point() +
labs(x="Year", y="Life expectancy", title="Gapminder")
Gapminder
80
Life expectancy
60
40
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

Year
Now, the figure has proper labels and titles. However, the title is not at the
center of the figure. We can further customize it using theme() function (for
more detail please see the docs ?theme).

geom_point() +
labs(x="Year", y="Life expectancy", title="Gapminder") +
theme(plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5))
Gapminder
80
Life expectancy
60
40
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

Year
35
Now figure looks better.

coord_cartesian can be used to set the limits of the x and y axes. Suppose
we want our y-axis to start at zero.

geom_point() +
coord_cartesian(ylim=c(0,90))
75
life_exp
50
25
0
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
year
Type scale_ and press the tab key. You will see functions giving fine-grained
controls over various scales (x, y, color, etc). These allow transformations (eg
log10), and manually specified breaks (labelled values). Very fine grained control
is possible over the appearance of ggplots, see the ggplot2 documentation for
details and further examples.
3.4.1 Challenge: refine your ggplot
Continuing with your scatter-plot of the 2010 data, add axis labels to your plot.
Give your x axis a log scale by adding scale_x_log10().
3.5 Faceting
Faceting lets us quickly produce a collection of small plots. The plots all have
the same scales and the eye can easily compare them.
ggplot(gap_geo, aes(x=year, y=life_exp, group=name)) +

geom_line() +
facet_wrap(~ region)
36
africa americas
80
60
40
20
life_exp
asia europe
80
60
40
20
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
year
Note the use of ~, which we’ve not seen before. ~ syntax is used in R to specify
dependence on some set of variables, for example when specifying a linear model.
Here the information in each plot is dependent on the continent.
3.5.1 Challenge: facet your ggplot
Let’s return again to your scatter-plot of the 2010 data.

Adjust your plot to now show data from all years, with each year shown in a
separate facet, using facet_wrap(~ year).
Advanced: Highlight Australia in your plot.
3.6 Saving ggplots

The act of plotting a ggplot is actually triggered when it is printed. In an
interactive session we are automatically printing each value we calculate, but if
you are using it with a programming construct such as a for loop or function
you might need to explcitly print( ) the plot.
Ggplots can be saved using ggsave.
# Plot created but not shown.

p <- ggplot(gap_geo, aes(x=year, y=life_exp)) + geom_point()
# Only when we try to look at the value p is it shown

p
# Alternatively, we can explicitly print it

print(p)
# To save to a file
37
ggsave("test.png", p)
# This is an alternative method that works with "base R" plots as well:
png("test.png")
print(p)
dev.off()
3.6.1 Tip about sizing
Figures in papers tend to be quite small. This means text must be proportion-
ately larger than we usually show on screen. Dots should also be proportionately
larger, and lines proportionately thicker. The way to achieve this using ggsave
is to specify a small width and height, given in inches. To ensure the output
also has good resolution, specify a high dots-per-inch, or use a vector-graphics
format such as PDF or SVG.
ggsave("test2.png", p, width=3, height=3, dpi=600)
38
Chapter 4
Summarizing data
Having loaded and thoroughly explored a data set, we are ready to distill it
down to concise conclusions. At its simplest, this involves calculating summary
statistics like counts, means, and standard deviations. Beyond this is the fitting
of models, and hypothesis testing and confidence interval calculation. R has a
huge number of packages devoted to these tasks and this is a large part of its
appeal, but is beyond the scope of today.
Loading the data as before, if you have not already done so:
library(tidyverse)

4.1 Summary functions

R has a variety of functions for summarizing a vector, including: sum, mean,
min, max, median, sd.
mean( c(1,2,3,4) )
## [1] 2.5
We can use these on the Gapminder data.

sum(gap2010$population)
## [1] 6949495061
39
CHAPTER 4. SUMMARIZING DATA
mean(gap2010$life_exp)
## [1] NA
4.2 Missing values

Why did mean fail? The reason is that life_exp contains missing values (NA).
gap2010$life_exp
## [1] 56.20 76.31 76.55 82.66 60.08 76.85 75.82 73.34 81.98 80.50 69.13 73.79
## [13] 76.03 70.39 76.68 70.43 79.98 71.38 61.82 72.13 71.64 76.75 57.06 74.19
## [25] 77.08 73.86 57.89 57.73 66.12 57.25 81.29 72.45 47.48 56.49 79.12 74.59
## [37] 76.44 65.93 57.53 60.43 80.40 56.34 76.33 78.39 79.88 77.47 79.49 63.69
## [49] 73.04 74.60 76.72 70.52 74.11 60.93 61.66 76.00 61.30 65.28 80.00 81.42
## [61] 62.86 65.55 72.82 80.09 62.16 80.41 71.34 71.25 57.99 55.65 65.49 32.11
## [73] 71.58 82.61 74.52 82.03 66.20 69.90 74.45 67.24 80.38 81.42 81.69 74.66
## [85] 82.85 75.78 68.37 62.76 60.73 70.10 80.13 78.20 68.45 63.80 73.06 79.85
## [97] 46.50 60.77 76.10 NA 73.17 81.35 74.01 60.84 53.07 74.46 77.91 59.46
## [109] 80.28 63.72 68.23 73.42 75.47 65.38 69.74 NA 66.18 76.36 73.55 54.48
## [121] 66.84 58.60 NA 68.26 80.73 80.90 77.36 58.78 60.53 81.04 76.09 65.33
## [133] NA 77.85 58.70 74.07 77.92 69.03 76.30 79.84 79.52 73.66 69.24 64.59
## [145] NA 75.48 71.64 71.46 NA 68.91 75.13 64.01 74.65 73.38 55.05 82.69
## [157] 75.52 79.45 61.71 53.13 54.27 81.94 74.42 66.29 70.32 46.98 81.52 82.21
## [169] 76.15 79.19 69.61 59.30 76.57 71.10 58.74 69.86 72.56 76.89 78.21 67.94
## [181] NA 56.81 70.41 76.51 80.34 78.74 76.36 68.77 63.02 75.41 72.27 73.07
## [193] 67.51 52.02 49.57 58.13
R will not ignore these unless we explicitly tell it to with na.rm=TRUE.
mean(gap2010$life_exp, na.rm=TRUE)
## [1] 70.34005
Ideally we should also use weighted.mean here, to take population into account.
weighted.mean(gap2010$life_exp, gap2010$population, na.rm=TRUE)
## [1] 70.96192
NA is a special value. If we try to calculate with NA, the result is NA
40
NA + 1
## [1] NA
is.na can be used to detect NA values, or na.omit can be used to directly

remove rows of a data frame containing them.
is.na( c(1,2,NA,3) )
## [1] FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE
cleaned <- filter(gap2010, !is.na(life_exp))

weighted.mean(cleaned$life_exp, cleaned$population)
## [1] 70.96192
4.3 Grouped summaries

The summarize function in dplyr allows summary functions to be applied to
data frames.
summarize(gap2010, mean_life_exp=weighted.mean(life_exp, population, na.rm=TRUE))
## mean_life_exp
## <dbl>
## 1 71.0
So far unremarkable, but summarize comes into its own when the group_by
“adjective” is used.
summarize(
group_by(gap_geo, year),
mean_life_exp=weighted.mean(life_exp, population, na.rm=TRUE))
## # A tibble: 22 x 2
## year mean_life_exp
## <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 1800 30.9
## 2 1810 31.1
## 3 1820 31.2
## 4 1830 31.4
## 5 1840 31.4
## 6 1850 31.6
41
## 7 1860 30.3
## 8 1870 31.5
## 9 1880 32.0
## 10 1890 32.5
Challenge: summarizing
What is the total population for each year? Plot the result.
Advanced: What is the total GDP for each year? For this you will first need to
calculate GDP per capita times the population of each country.
group_by can be used to group by multiple columns, much like count. We can
use this to see how the rest of the world is catching up to OECD nations in
terms of life expectancy.
result <- summarize(

group_by(gap_geo,year,oecd),
mean_life_exp=weighted.mean(life_exp, population, na.rm=TRUE))
result
## # A tibble: 44 x 3
## # Groups: year [22]
## year oecd mean_life_exp
## <dbl> <lgl> <dbl>
## 1 1800 FALSE 29.9
## 2 1800 TRUE 34.7
## 3 1810 FALSE 29.9
## 4 1810 TRUE 35.2
## 5 1820 FALSE 30.0
## 6 1820 TRUE 35.9
## 7 1830 FALSE 30.0
## 8 1830 TRUE 36.2
## 9 1840 FALSE 30.0
## 10 1840 TRUE 36.2
ggplot(result, aes(x=year,y=mean_life_exp,color=oecd)) + geom_line()
42
80
70
mean_life_exp
60 oecd
FALSE
50 TRUE
40
30
1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

year
A similar plot could be produced using geom_smooth. Differences here are that
we have full control over the summarization process so we were able to use the
exact summarization method we want (weighted.mean for each year), and we
have access to the resulting numeric data as well as the plot. We have reduced
a large data set down to a smaller one that distills out one of the stories present
in this data. However the earlier visualization and exploration activity using
ggplot2 was essential. It gave us an idea of what sort of variability was present
in the data, and any unexpected issues the data might have.
4.4 t-test
We will finish this section by demonstrating a t-test. The main point of this
section is to give a flavour of how statistical tests work in R, rather than the
details of what a t-test does.
Has life expectancy increased from 2000 to 2010?

t.test(gap2010$life_exp, gap2000$life_exp)
##
## Welch Two Sample t-test
##
## data: gap2010$life_exp and gap2000$life_exp
## t = 3.0341, df = 374.98, p-value = 0.002581
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
## 1.023455 4.792947
43
## sample estimates:
## mean of x mean of y
## 70.34005 67.43185
Statistical routines often have many ways to tweak the details of their operation.
These are specified by further arguments to the function call, to override the
default behaviour. By default, t.test performs an unpaired t-test, but these
are repeated observations of the same countries. We can specify paired=TRUE
to t.test to perform a paired sample t-test and gain some statistical power.
Check this by looking at the help page with ?t.test.
It’s important to first check that both data frames are in the same order.
all(gap2000$name == gap2010$name)
## [1] TRUE
t.test(gap2010$life_exp, gap2000$life_exp, paired=TRUE)
##
## Paired t-test
##
## data: gap2010$life_exp and gap2000$life_exp
## t = 13.371, df = 188, p-value < 2.2e-16
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
## 2.479153 3.337249
## sample estimates:
## mean of the differences
## 2.908201
When performing a statistical test, it’s good practice to visualize the data to
make sure there is nothing funny going on.
plot(gap2000$life_exp, gap2010$life_exp)
abline(0,1)
44
80
70
gap2010$life_exp
60
50
40
50 60 70 80
gap2000$life_exp
This is a visual confirmation of the t-test result. If there were no difference

between the years then points would lie approximately evenly above and below
the diagonal line, which is clearly not the case. However the outlier may warrant
investigation.
45
Chapter 5
Thinking in R
The result of a t-test is actually a value we can manipulate further. Two func-
tions help us here. class gives the “public face” of a value, and typeof gives
its underlying type, the way R thinks of it internally. For example numbers are
“numeric” and have some representation in computer memory, either “integer”
for whole numbers only, or “double” which can hold fractional numbers (stored
in memory in a base-2 version of scientific notation).
class(42)
## [1] "numeric"
typeof(42)
## [1] "double"
Let’s look at the result of a t-test:
result <- t.test(gap2010$life_exp, gap2000$life_exp, paired=TRUE)
class(result)
## [1] "htest"
typeof(result)
## [1] "list"
names(result)
## [1] "statistic" "parameter" "p.value" "conf.int" "estimate"

## [6] "null.value" "alternative" "method" "data.name"
46
CHAPTER 5. THINKING IN R
result$p.value
## [1] 4.301261e-29
In R, a t-test is just another function returning just another type of data, so

it can also be a building block. The value it returns is a special type of vector
called a “list”, but with a public face that presents itself nicely. This is a common
pattern in R. Besides printing to the console nicely, this public face may alter
the behaviour of generic functions such as plot and summary.
Similarly a data frame is a list of vectors that is able to present itself nicely.
5.1 Lists
Lists are vectors that can hold anything as elements (even other lists!). It’s
possible to create lists with the list function. This becomes especially useful
once you get into the programming side of R. For example writing your own
function that needs to return multiple values, it could do so in the form of a
list.
mylist <- list(hello=c("Hello","world"), numbers=c(1,2,3,4))

mylist
## $hello
## [1] "Hello" "world"
##
## $numbers
## [1] 1 2 3 4
class(mylist)
## [1] "list"
typeof(mylist)
## [1] "list"
names(mylist)
## [1] "hello" "numbers"
Accessing lists can be done by name with $ or by position with [[ ]].
47
CHAPTER 5. THINKING IN R
mylist$hello
## [1] "Hello" "world"
mylist[[2]]
## [1] 1 2 3 4
5.2 Other types not covered here

Matrices are another tabular data type. These come up when doing more math-
ematical tasks in R. They are also commonly used in bioinformatics, for example
to represent RNA-Seq count data. A matrix, as compared to a data frame:
• contains only one type of data, usually numeric (rather than different
types in different columns).
• commonly has rownames as well as colnames. (Base R data frames can
have rownames too, but it is easier to have any unique identifier as a
normal column instead.)
• has individual cells as the unit of observation (rather than rows).
Matrices can be created using as.matrix from a data frame, matrix from a
single vector, or using rbind or cbind with several vectors.
You may also encounter “S4 objects”, especially if you use Bioconductor1 pack-
ages. The syntax for using these is different again, and uses @ to access elements.
5.3 Programming
Once you have a useful data analysis, you may want to do it again with different
data. You may have some task that needs to be done many times over. This is
where programming comes in:
• Writing your own functions2 .

• For-loops3 to do things multiple times.
• If-statements4 to make decisions.
The “R for Data Science” book5 is an excellent source to learn more. Monash
Data Fluency “Programming and Tidy data analysis in R” course6 also covers
this.
1 http://bioconductor.org/
2 http://r4ds.had.co.nz/functions.html
3 http://r4ds.had.co.nz/iteration.html
4 http://r4ds.had.co.nz/functions.html#conditional-execution
6 https://monashdatafluency.github.io/r-progtidy/
48
Chapter 6
Next steps
6.1 Deepen your understanding

Our number one recommendation is to read the book “R for Data
Science”1 by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham.
Also, statistical tasks such as model fitting, hypothesis testing, confidence in-
terval calculation, and prediction are a large part of R, and one we haven’t
demonstrated fully today. Linear models, and the linear model formula syn-
tax ~, are core to much of what R has to offer statistically. Many statistical
techniques take linear models as their starting point, including limma2 for dif-
ferential gene expression, glm for logistic regression (etc), survival analysis with
coxph, and mixed models to characterize variation within populations.
• “Statistical Models in S” by J.M. Chambers and T.J. Hastie is the primary

reference for this, although there are some small differences between R and
its predecessor S.
• “An Introduction to Statistical Learning”3 by G. James, D. Witten, T.

Hastie and R. Tibshirani can be seen as further development of the ideas
in “Statistical Models in S”, and is available online. It has more of a
machine learning than a statistics flavour to it (the distinction is fuzzy!).
• “Modern Applied Statistics with S” by W.N. Venable and B.D. Ripley is
a well respected reference covering R and S.
• “Linear Models with R” and “Extending the Linear Model with R” by J.
Faraway4 cover linear models, with many practical examples.
2 https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/limma.html
3 http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/
4 http://www.maths.bath.ac.uk/~jjf23/
49
CHAPTER 6. NEXT STEPS
6.2 Expand your vocabulary

Have a look at these cheat sheets to see what is possible with R.
• RStudio’s collection of cheat sheets5 cover newer packages in R.

• An old-school cheat sheet6 for dinosaurs and people wishing to go deeper.
• A Bioconductor cheat sheet7 for biological data.
The R Manuals8 are the place to look if you need a precise definition of how R
behaves.
6.3 Join the community

Join the Data Fluency community at Monash9 .
• Mailing list for workshop and event announcements.

• Slack for discussion.
• Monthly seminars on Data Science topics.
• Drop-in sessions on Friday afternoon.
Meetups in Melbourne:
• MelbURN10
• R-Ladies11
The Carpentries12 run intensive two day workshops on scientific computing

and data science topics worldwide. The style of this present workshop is very
much based on theirs. For bioinformatics, COMBINE13 is an Australian student
and early career researcher organization, and runs Carpentries workshops and
similar.
5 https://www.rstudio.com/resources/cheatsheets/
6 https://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf
7 https://github.com/mikelove/bioc-refcard/blob/master/README.Rmd
8 https://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html
9 https://www.monash.edu/data-fluency
10 https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/MelbURN-Melbourne-Users-of-R-Network/
11 https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/R-Ladies-Melbourne/
12 https://carpentries.org/
13 https://combine.org.au/
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Introduction to R, version 2

3 Plotting with ggplot2 30

• PDF version for printing5

R is the language itself. RStudio provides a convenient environment in which

Authors and copyright

This work is licensed under a CC BY-4: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

R is both a programming language and an interactive environment for data

• A text editor, where R commands can be recorded for future reference.

RStudio helpfully shows us the variable in the “Environment” pane. We can

Examples of valid variables names: hello, subject_id, subject.ID, x42.

and even save the result in another variable:

# Save area in "area" variable

We can also change a variable’s value by assigning it a new value:

1.2 Saving code in an R script

Challenge: using variables

1. Re-write this calculation so that it doesn’t use variables:

2. Re-write this calcuation over multiple lines, using a variable:

myvec <- c(10,20,30,40,50)

1.4 Types of vector

Challenge: mixing types

1.5 Indexing vectors

Can we use a vector to index another vector? Yes!

myind <- c(4,3,2)

We could equivalently have written:

items <- c("spam", "eggs", "beans", "bacon", "sausage")

This can be useful when combined with indexing:

## [1] "spam" "eggs" "beans" "bacon"

As with many functions in R—which is obsessed with vectors—the thing to be

So far we have used positional arguments, where R determines which argument

rep(c(1,2,3), each=3, times=5)

Challenge: using functions

1. Use sum to sum from 1 to 10,000.

# Download files for this workshop

We need to load the tidyverse package in order to use it.

The tidyverse package loads various other packages, setting up a modern R

2.2 Loading data

geo <- read_csv("r-intro-2-files/geo.csv")

## Parsed with column specification:

read_csv has guessed the type of data each column holds:

• <chr> - character strings

We will also encounter:

• <int> - integers, a fancy name for whole numbers.

The argument names become column names in the data frame.

The path to the file on our server is "r-intro-2-files/geo.csv". This says,

We can extract details of the data frame with further functions:

## [1] "name" "region" "oecd" "g77" "lat"

## name region oecd g77

2.4 Indexing data frames

Multiple rows or columns may be retrieved using a vector.

rows_wanted <- c(1,3,5)

Vector indexing can also be written on a single line.

2.5 Columns are vectors

## [1] "asia" "europe" "africa" "europe" "africa" "americas"

## [1] "asia" "europe" "africa" "europe" "africa" "americas"

For example, to plot the longitudes and latitudes we could use:

−150 −100 −50 0 50 100 150

2.6 Logical indexing