Monday, 25 February, 2019 | 17:30 | Economics Discovery Hub

Introduction to R Programming

Mondays + Wednesdays 17:30 - 19:30 (25.2., 27.2., 4.3., 11.3., 13.3.)
Starting date: 25 February 2019
Finishing date: 13 March 2019
Duration: 5 lessons
Course instructor: Vladimir Pyrlik

Registration for this course is closed.

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This course will provide you with the ability to handle essential data work in R. We are going to use RStudio to practice using the essential R tools for basic data analysis: loading and opening the data, performing basic descriptive analysis and visualization, using some functions and tools to process the data, and reporting the results in form of either a report or a presentation. 

Prerequisites:

Lectures:

  1. (Monday, 25 February) Introductory session: short recap on the installation of R and RStudio; writing the first script; setting up the working directory; saving and opening projects; downloading, installing and using packages; getting help from the official materials or the community. This session should be attended by those who are not familiar with R and/or RStudio at all.
  2. (Wednesday, 27 February) Basic operations with data: data types, variables, vectors, data frames; opening data from different sources (text/csv files, foreign data formats like xls, dta etc.), saving and opening data in R native format; basic descriptive analysis.
  3. (Monday, 4 March) Plotting data and basics of visualization: main graphical systems of R; a few examples of using them for various tasks (cross-sectional sample visualization; time-series plotting; spatial data plotting with maps).
  4. (Monday, 11 March) Functions and essential programming operations: functions in R; custom functions; applying "scalar" functions to multidimensional data; looping constructions; if time permits, basic quasi-parallel tasks handling.
  5. (Wednesday, 13 March) Reporting the results: writing a report or creating a presentation using built-in R tools, creating an example report and a simple presentation in rmd format. 

Participants who attend at least 75% of the sessions can claim a Certificate of Attendance issued by CERGE-EI.

About the facilitator:

Vladimir Pyrlik
Vladimir is a CERGE-EI PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow.  He uses R when teaching econometrics and data science related courses. He likes to use R for non-structured data processing, especially working with textual data and transforming datasets of text into structured data that can be further used in regular data analysis, and for data scrapping from various web sources that do not necessarily support direct automated data collection. He also uses R for his research, where he has to deal with large datasets.

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