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  • 1.  Course on Learning R

    Posted 03-28-2011 10:49
    Today, and coming on Dr. Dobbins' request (!), I got this message in my mailbox, here it is as sent me:

    Registration is open for a new online course entitled Fundamentals of Using R. This course has never been offered online. The course is being offered through the Information Institute (http://www.information-institute.org), a charitable, non-profit, educational and scientific organization.
     
    R (http://www.R-project.org) is a powerful, open source, data and statistical analysis programming environment. The early registration cost (through April 23) for the 14-hour, 5 week course is $195 (student); $250 (faculty); and $295 (practitioner).
     
    This is the first course on R that anyone should complete. This course is designed for people who are curious about R, new to R, and who would like to obtain a basic knowledge of R capabilities that apply to any ultimate intended use of R. This course instructs about the R environment: using workspaces; importing and exporting data; R data types, data structures, and objects; writing simple and complex scripts; essential R functions and packages; writing your own R functions and packages; programming with R; publication-style 2-D and 3-D graphics capabilities using special R packages, and many other essential topics. The course is designed to serve as a useful knowledge foundation regardless of one's ultimate use of R (for example, statistical and data analyses, programming, writing scripts or creating packages, using graphics, etc.). There is more information at the URLs below.
     
    The informational (and registration) site for the AM version (AM by US Eastern Time) is here: https://www.regonline.com/R-fund-may-AM This course runs on five consecutive Fridays from May 27 to June 24, from 11AM until 2PM ET.
     
    The informational (and registration) site for the PM version (PM by US Eastern Time) is here: https://www.regonline.com/R-fund-may-PM  This course runs on the same five consecutive Fridays (May 27-June 24), but in the evenings from 6PM until 9PM ET.
     
    Feel free to email ghubona@vcu.edu with any questions or for more information.
     
    Geoff Hubona
    Information Systems Department
    Virginia Commonwealth University

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    Milton Goldsamt
    Survey Statistician
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  • 2.  RE:Course on Learning R

    Posted 03-28-2011 14:07
    Responding to Dr. Dobbins' request for a video introduction to R, below are two short courses conducted by statistical collaborators from LISA (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis) at Virginia Tech. These short courses were taught by statistics graduate students and were designed to help non-statistics graduate students learn to use R for analyzing data. They are free and may be useful for others wanting to learn R. Note: neither course discusses how to download and install R on your computer. To do that go to http://www.r-project.org/

    Course #1: "Using R for Your Basic Statistical Needs" by Nels Johnson
    Description and R code: http://www.lisa.stat.vt.edu/?q=node/1456
    Screen recording and audio: http://www.vimeo.com/17615082

    Course #2: "Intro to R" by Sai Wang
    Description and R code: http://www.lisa.stat.vt.edu/?q=node/1947
    Screen recording and audio: http://www.vimeo.com/21347748

    LISA (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis) has been Virginia Tech's source for expert statistical analysis since 1948. The mission of LISA is to provide statistical advice, analysis, and education to Virginia Tech researchers by offering one-on-one collaboration meetings, walk-in consulting, educational short courses, and support for multidisciplinary research projects. The statistical collaborators of LISA are trained to help design experiments, analyze and plot data, run statistical software, interpret results, and communicate statistical concepts to non-statisticians.

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    Eric Vance
    Assistant Research Professor
    Director of LISA
    Virginia Tech
    http://www.lisa.stat.vt.edu
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  • 3.  RE:Course on Learning R

    Posted 03-29-2011 15:17
    (Not a Video, but still ...)

    In case you are interested, you can read TR 2005-6, An Introduction to R for Windows, available at http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/cqas/about/technicalreports.htm. This was updated November 26, 2008, but a new update (mostly fixing some typos) should be available within the week.

    Simple stuff, but just what you need to get started, and it includes all the script files so you don't need to enter them by hand.


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    Joseph Voelkel
    Rochester Institute of Technology
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE:Course on Learning R

    Posted 03-29-2011 15:40
    We use R quite a lot for routine statistical analysis, complex modeling and bioinformatics (BioConductor).

    We also use R as the stat program platform for intro to biostatistics for basic and translational sicence grad students.

    There are many good books, including the book we use in class, which is Dalgaard: Intro to Statistics with R (2nd ed). I think a training course or workshop in R would be more useful after going through the Dalgaard book (or similar) to get some background on the structure, syntax, objects, etc.

    We also use the GUI interface Rcommander (see library(Rcmdr)) by John Fox and many others. This is a constantly improving tool that gives the students (and me sometimes) an easy point and click interface, but generates code that can be tweeked and saved (most important), to document the analysis.

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    Susan Hilsenbeck
    Professor
    Baylor College of Medicine
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE:Course on Learning R

    Posted 03-29-2011 16:28
    Two notes.

    1. Some of you have told me in private emails that the link I provided does not work. It does, but this posting software does not eliminate punctuation marks after the link. So, click on the link, and then remove the "." from the link that appears in your browser. Or just use
    http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/cqas/about/technicalreports.htm

    2. The TR is technically designed for Windows, but 98% of it will work on other platforms. I believe the Windows-specific part will usually be clear. Something that will not be clear: I believe the windows() function in Windows (not the same meaning for these two "identical" words!) for opening a new graph is the quartz() function on a Mac.

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    Joseph Voelkel
    Rochester Institute of Technology
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    Original Message