By Hillary Figler

The Huck Graduate Student Advisory Committee has begun a new initiative: skills workshops! The HGSAC polled students to determine topics of interest and then held an open vote to select topics for the first couple of workshops. Last month we had our second one, this time focusing on the statistical language, R. Libby Benson, graduate student in Human Development and Family studies and president of the We R: Penn State R Users’ Group led the workshop.

The workshop focused on taking those with limited R experience through the basics of functions, objects and plotting. Libby also taught participants how to produce reproducible files with documentation in RMarkdown. The goal of the workshop was to introduce participants to R basics and connect them with resources for continuing their R education. The We R group has weekly meetings that are open to all. Email leb237@psu.edu if you are interested in joining! Some resources are listed below (courtesy of Libby).

Look out for future HGSAC-sponsored workshops! On the docket this semester: team building. Comment below if you have additional ideas or would like to see other topics covered.

 

Downloads

• R
  • https://cran.r-project.org/
• RStudio (get this!)
  • https://www.rstudio.com/

Learn R

• Swirl (http://swirlstats.com/)
• Discovering Statistics Using R by Andy Field
  • http://studysites.sagepub.com/dsur/main.htm
• Code School
  • http://tryr.codeschool.com/
• Cyclismo by Kelly Black
  • http://www.cyclismo.org/tutorial/R/

R Markdown

• http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/

Visualization

• http://www.cookbook-r.com/Graphs/
• http://zevross.com/blog/2014/08/04/beautiful-plotting-in-r-a-ggplot2-cheatsheet-3/

Blogs (a wealth of useful information contained in these)

• Revolution analytics
  • http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/
• R-Bloggers
  • http://www.r-bloggers.com/
• Noam Ross’ Davis R Users’ Group
  • http://www.noamross.net/davis-r-users-group.html
• R-statistics blog
  • http://www.r-statistics.com/
• inside-R
  • http://www.inside-r.org/blogs

Getting help

• Type a question and then end with “in R”
  • Example: How do I subset variables in R?
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r
• www.statmethods.net
• http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/

Competitions

• Kaggle “the home of data science”
  • https://www.kaggle.com/

RNAseq Analysis in R

• http://combine-australia.github.io/RNAseq-R/

Power Analysis in R

• http://www.statmethods.net/stats/power.html
• https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/pwr/pwr.pdf
• https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/pwr/vignettes/pwr-vignette.html
• https://rcompanion.org/rcompanion/b_02.html