INTRODUCTION TO R TRAININGS

Rafiki Murenzi

26. April 2024

Contents

Outlines: 2

Section 1: Introduction to R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Section 2: R objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Section 3: IF statements, functions and Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Section 4: DataFrames manipulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Section 5: Data Visualization with ggplot2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Section 6: Geospatial Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1. Introduction to R 3

1.1 Why choose R? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1.2 Here are advantages of R: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1.3 R Studio interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1.4 CRAN, library, packages, and functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

CRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

What’s on your bookshelf? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Installing Packages on a Personal Computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

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Outlines:

Section 1: Introduction to R

• Getting started
• R Studio interface

Section 2: R objects

• Creating Vectors and Matrices in R

• Factors in R: Categorical & Continuous Variables

• Difference between Table, DataFrames and array

Section 3: IF statements, functions and Loops

• IF, ELSE, ELSE IF Statement in R.

• Create Functions in R
• Loops in R

• Exercises

Section 4: DataFrames manipulation

• Import Data into R: Read CSV, Excel, SPSS, Stata…

• R Data Frames: Create, Append, Select, Subset, Sort
• Dealing with Missing Values(NA) in R
• R Dplyr Tutorial: introduction to dplyr

• R Dplyr Tutorial: Aggregate Function

• Dplyr Tutorial : Merge, join, append and reshape in R
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Section 5: Data Visualization with ggplot2

• ggplot2 syntax
• Axis labels and Legends

Section 6: Geospatial Graphs

• Introduction to “ggmap” and “sf”

• Practical exemple on Geospacial map

1. Introduction to R

R is a powerful and flexible tool with a big and active community of users and developers that constantly
posts in blogs and forums.

1.1 Why choose R?

• It is way cooler.
• It is less specialized

• More flexibility when programming

• many other functionalities.
• Much broader network of users in general

• Development of new features and bug fixes happens faster.

• It makes prettier graphs.

1.2 Here are advantages of R:

• R is a free and open source software!

• It allows you to have several data sets open simultaneously.
• It can run complex Geographic Information System (GIS) analyses.
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• You can use it for web scrapping.

• You can run machine learning algorithms with it.
• You can create complex Markdown documents. This presentation, for example, is entirely done in
RStudio.

• You can create dashboards and online applications with the Shiny package.

1.3 R Studio interface

When RStudio is open at the beginning it has 4 different windows: Console window, code editer, environment
or histories and Packages/Help/plots etc…

Figure 1: R data types.

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• Code Editor:script, data, command to run script.

– This is the panel you’re reading this tutorial in. It contains the script editor where we can create
and edit R Notebook files, among other files.
• Console: console for running scripts.
– This is the Console Panel where R code is passed to and executed.
• Environment/History: environment
– The environment tab keeps track of variables we’ve created in this workspace.
• Files/help etc: files, plots, packages, help
– This is a multi-purpose panel which contains:
∗ Files: A basic file explorer,
∗ Plots: Where plots can be rendered,
∗ Packages: install and import libraries into R,
∗ Help: Explorer for Documentation of functions and libraries,
∗ Viewer: View local web content e.g. Shiny app.

1.4 CRAN, library, packages, and functions

So far, we’ve seen R’s capabilities as a large calculator and also as a place for storing objects and vectors.
However, it is much much more than that! One of the things that makes R amazing is the open source
community surrounding it.

The R community which is made up of academics, statisticians, social and political scientists, economists,
and data scientists to name a few, are responsible for authoring a wide variety of packages (> 15,000) that
can do a wide range of data manipulation, visualisation, and analysis tasks.

To get your head around what CRAN, library, packages, and functions are I find it helpful to think of books.

CRAN

CRAN stands for the Comprehensive R Archive Network. It’s like the R equivalent of the British Library
or Library of Congress. It holds a copy of every package (book) and all the versions of R.

Library

On your computer you’ll have a local library with copies of the packages you’ve installed from CRAN (your
home office book shelf).
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What’s on your bookshelf?

• Click on the ‘Packages’ tab in the lower right hand panel (Q4 from before). You can see what packages
are in your library, a short description of what they do, and the package version.

• The packages that are loaded have a check mark in the box on the left. As before, there are several
packages that are automatically loaded each time you start an R session, e.g. base package.
• Although it is possible to load and install your packages from here, I recommend using the functions
shown below instead. This way, someone else or future you knows exactly what packages they need
to run the analyses.
• You should load the packages you will use at the top of your script, so that future you or your colleague
knows what needs to be installed/loaded.

Installing Packages on a Personal Computer

A package needs to be installed only once and requires an internet connection which allows your computer
to communicate with the CRAN server. There is two ways to install a package On your personal computer.

The first is to install a package to your local library from CRAN by uncommenting and running the following:

”[Link](PackageName)”.

You may wish to install a package with the additional argument: dependencies = TRUE, this will also install
any packages that the package depends on.

”[Link](PackageName,dependencies=TRUE)”

The second way is to use the RStudio interface as follow.

1. Run R studio.

2. Click on the Tool tab in the upper-right section and then click on install packages. The following
dialog box will appear.
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3. In the Install Packages dialog, write the package name you want to install under the Packages field
and then click install.

Figure 2: Install Packages in R.