(2020) Introduction to R

R is rapidly becoming the most important scripting language for both experimental and computational biologists. It is well designed, efficient, widely adopted and has a very large base of contributors who add new functionality for all modern aspects of data analysis and visualization. Moreover it is free and open source. However, R’s great power and expressivity can at first be difficult to approach without guidance, especially for those who are new to programming. This workshop introduces the essential ideas and tools of R. Although this workshop will cover running statistical tests in R, it does not cover statistical concepts.

Participants will gain practical experience and skills to be able to:

• Meet the challenges of data handling
• Break down problems into structured parts
• Use R syntax, functions and packages
• Understand best practices for scientific computational work

Graduates, postgraduates, and PIs who design and execute strategies for data analysis but have little or no familiarity with the R statistical workbench. This workshop is designed to lead on to the two-day workshop on Exploratory Data Analysis, which follows it.

You will also require your own laptop computer. Minimum requirements: 1024×768 screen resolution, 1.5GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, 10GB free disk space, recent versions of Windows, Mac OS X or Linux (Most computers purchased in the past 3-4 years likely meet these requirements). If you do not have access to your own computer, please contact support@bioinformatics.ca for other possible options.

This workshop requires participants to complete pre-workshop tasks and readings.