Facilitator: David Selassie Opoku, School of Data

Driving Insights With R

R is a powerful statistic and graphics language and environment used by many individuals and organisations in their day-to-day work with data. In this short training, participants will learn about R, install a working version on their computer, get familiar with the language and environment and take it out for a simple test drive. By the end of this workshop, a participant should:

• Know what R and RStudio are (pun intended!)
• Have a working version of R and RStudio on their computers
• Be familiar with some features of RStudio
• Know some basic commands of the R language
• See the power of R packages and how to use them
• Know where to go for a deeper dive into R

Outline

• Part 1

  • About R
  • Downloading & Setup
  • Getting Familiar with RStudio
  • Some Basic R Commands

• Part 2

  • Working Dataset: Ghana Health Facilities
  • The Power of R Packages
  • Building Your Data Pipeline

• Part 3

  • References

Part 1: Introduction & Overview

About R

R is a powerful

Downloading & Setup

• Download R from CRAN website

• Download RStudio IDE from RStudio website

• Exercise 1: Setup RStudio on Your Computer

  1. Go to CRAN website, download your version of R and get it installed on your computer.
  • Go to RStudio website, download your version of RStudio IDE and get it installed on your computer.

Getting Familiar with RStudio

RStudio is a powerful Integrated Development Environment(IDE) that provides a convenient environment to run R-related tasks and projects easily. I will briefly review some of the keys features of RStudio but see this cheatsheet for more details.

• Menus

• Panes/Windows

  • Source Editor
  • Console

• Help

• Exercise 2:

  1. Create a new R Project

Some Basic R Commands

• Data Containers & Formats: vector, matrix, array, data frame, list, factors.
• Functions: str, length, dim, names, summary, ls, help/?, read.csv, table, View etc.

Part 2: Getting Hands-on

Working Dataset: Ghana Health Facilities Dataset

The Power of R Packages

Building Your Data Pipeline

At School of Data, we like to think about the data analysis process as a pipeline. Below is a framework we usually use:

#### References & Resources - [RStudio Visualisation with ggplot2 cheatsheet](http://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ggplot2-cheatsheet-2.0.pdf) - [R Project](https://www.r-project.org/) - [Datacamp](https://www.datacamp.com/) - Hadley Wickham: follow on Twitter, @hadleywichkam - [R-bloggers](http://www.r-bloggers.com/) - [Flowing Data Website](www.flowingdata.com)