Chapter 1 Welcome

Welcome to Introduction to R Welcome to this online introduction to R. Before your statistics course starts, you should have obtained some familiarity with R. The purpose of introducing R online is to give you a good start working with R and help you focus on the statistical methods during course start instead of focusing on the statistical software.

In this introduction we guide you through how to install R, how to interact with R and how to use R for simple calculations. Further we will explain how data is stored in R, how to load data and define new data variables. You will be given some videos and a text on how to use R. As learning R requires training you will also find a series of exercises in quiz form. Having completed each quiz, you are given automatic feedback.

If you have only got limited time before the start of Basic Statistics for Health Researchers, we recommend that you focus on the videos. During the class room sessions two teachers will be present to help you get a good start. If you are familiar with R you may browse through the material (maybe focus on the part on loading data to R to make sure that you can load the type of datafiles used in the Basic Statistics course).

It is the first time we give this introduction and we therefore ask you to 1) register how many hours you spend on the material 2) to give us a feedback on the material (which parts are too easy / difficult / unstructured …) 3) let us know if there are any errors or dead links. We are quite new users of Absalon so maybe we have overlooked something. If you have any feedback while working with the introduction, you may put them anonymously here (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. We intend to develop further material during Basic Statistics in the autumn 2018 so if you have any suggestions on how to organize the material and the contents, please let us know!

There will be no personal feedback but if you have any general questions you may pose these in the discussion forum and we will do our best to respond as quickly as possible. Maybe other students willl have the same questions as you. You find the forum here or by clicking on ‘Discussions’ to the left of this page. The discussion is visible for all course participants. If you experience any problems you should not email the course director (Lene Theil Skovgaard) or the course secretary (Susanne Kragskov Laupstad) as they are not involved in this online introduction. Instead use one of the two options listed above.

The introduction is organized in a series of modules. Each module contains introductory material (text and videos) and is completed with a quiz. To browse between the different modules use the Previous / Next buttons at the bottom of the pages or click on ‘Modules’ to the left of this page. To browse within a module, use the tabs on the top of the pages. To get an overview of the modules go to the next tab (press the Modules-tab on the top of this page).

1.1 Overview of modules

The introduction currently contains 4 modules:

R and RStudio Basic R The R data structure R data import Visualization in R We intend to add further modules and produce a page where you can find a list and a description of all commands described in the modules.

We recommend that you follow the course chronologically the first time, as later video lessons may use the contents from earlier video lessons. When you are getting familiar with R and RStudio, the videos can be watched separately and used more as an encyclopedia/tutorial for specific R related matters.

Now press the ‘Next’-button below to start the first module or click on the link above to the ‘R and RStudio’ module. You may also click on the ‘Modules’ to the left of this page to have an overview of the modules. If you have logged in to Absalon you should be able to see which quizzes you have completed previously.

Have fun!