Basics of R

Basics of R
 Introduction to R
 Data Structures in R
 R Workspace
 Packages in R
 Reading,writing a dataset
 First steps with a dataset
Introduction to R
 Introduction to R

 What is R ?
 First steps with R
 How to use Rstudio ?
 Online Resources for R
 History of R
• R is a successor of S Language
• Originally designed by two University of Auckland Professors
for their intro to statistics course.
 Why R?

• R is an open source language

• R is an interpreted language; users typically access it through a command-line
interpreter(similar to Unix)
• Strong object-oriented programming facilities than most statistical computing
languages.
• Easily extensible through functions and extensions, and the R community is noted
for its active contributions in terms of packages.
• Provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques
 The Comprehensive R Archive
Network(CRAN)
• CRAN is the main repository for R core and its community built
libraries.
• It is the global community of R users and developers that is R’s
primary strength

http://cran.r-project.org
 RStudio

RStudio is a free and open source integrated development environment (IDE) for R

It has some nice features that make code development in R easy and fun, such as:
 Code highlighting, making it easier to read
 Automatic bracket matching
 Code completion, so as to reduce the effort of typing the commands in full
 Easy access to R Help
 Easy exploration of variables and values

http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/
 RStudio

Source Editor Workspace/History

R Console Files/Plots/Packages/Help
 RStudio
• Source : Contains a text editor. Users can save script file to disk, and perform other tasks
on the script
• Console :All the interactive work of R is performed here
• Workspace : This is where the variables created in the session along with their values
can be inspected.
• History : The area where the user can see a history of the commands issued in R
• Files: This is where the user can browse folders and files on a computer
• Plots: This is where R displays the user’s plots
• Packages :Shows list of installed packages
• Help: This is where you can browse the built-in Help system of R.
 Command Line

> New command

+ Awaiting completion of command

 Packages

• Packages are collections of R functions, data, and compiled code in a well-defined

format. The directory where packages are stored is called the library

• Currently, the CRAN package repository features ~13000 available packages

• CRAN Task Views allow you to browse packages by topic and provide tools to
automatically install all packages for special areas of interest

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/
 Online Resources

• R-bloggers : http://www.r-bloggers.com/
• Revolution Analytics : http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/
• R Data Mining : http://rdatamining.wordpress.com/
• Stack overflow : http://stackoverflow.com/
Data Structures in R
 Data Structures in R

 Vectors
 Lists
 Matrices
 Arrays
 Dataframes
 Data Structures in R

Vectors
 Most Simplest structure in R
 If data has only one dimension, like a set of digits, then vectors can be
used to represent it.

Lists
 It contain all kinds of other objects, including vectors, other lists or data
frames
 It can contain objects of different data types
 Data Structures in R

Matrices
 Used when data is a higher dimensional array
 But contains only data of a single class Eg : only character or numeric

Data Frames
 It is like a single table with rows and columns of data
 The columns can be of different classes
 Modes of Vectors

 Character
 Integer
 Numeric
 Complex
 Factor
 Date

>vec<-c(1,2,3,4,5)
> class(vec)
[1] "numeric"
 Factors

 Factors are useful for calculations on categorical and qualitative

variables,
 e.g. gender, Marital Status, Credit Card status or group label.
 Subsetting Data Structures

 All the data structures can be subsetted using brackets in R

R Workspace
 R Workspace

 Setting Working Directory

 Save Objects
 Load Objects
 R Workspace

Set your working directory

 By default R maps to a certain current working directory
 getwd() : Used to check current working directory
 setwd() : For setting the current working directory as per choice

 In Windows, use “\\” or “/” to delimit file paths

 R Workspace
ls()
 Lists all the objects currently in your workspace
 Once you close your Rstudio session, all objects are lost

save.image() load()
 Saves all objects in the workspace  Loads all objects in the file into
to the file the workspace

save.image(file="Intro_to_R_objects.RData") load(file="Intro_to_R_objects.RData")
Packages
 What is a Package?

 Packages are collections of R functions, data, and compiled code in a

well-defined format.
 The directory where packages are stored is called the library.
 R comes with a standard set of packages. Others are available for
download and installation.
 Where to find Packages?

• The CRAN website has a “Task Views” page that allows you to view packages
according to subject area

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/
 Packages :Install & Load
• Suppose you want to analyze the mtcars dataset using a randomForest
model.
• The base R installation does not have this capability natively.
• Hence you need to install the Package that has the randomForest model
algorithm
 Packages :Install & Load
• To check the list of existing packages (already installed)
library()

• To check the list of packages currently loaded

search()
Reading and Writing Data
 Reading and Writing Data

First set your working directory

 read.csv() : Read comma separated files read.csv(“data.csv”)

 read.table() : Read data based on the

read.table(“data.txt”,sep=“\t”,h=False)
delimiter

 write.csv() : writes the object as a csv write.csv(iris,“E:\\iris_data.csv”)

file
First Steps with a dataset
 First steps with a dataset

 head : Displays the first few rows of the dataset

 dim: Displays the number of rows and columns in a dataset
 str : Displays the structure of the dataset
 summary : To study the distribution of numeric values in the dataset
 table : Gives the frequency distribution of the variable
First steps with a dataset