This is the Economics Department’s informal website for R, a popular and free statistical programming language. Many of our statistics and econometrics classes use R. This site will help you get started installing and using this software.
This site (a work-in-progress) is maintained by Lawrence De Geest. Drop me a line if you have any questions, find any bugs (bug spotters will be acknowledged!), or want to get involved with SuffolkEcon!
Is this your first exposure to R?
If so, before downloading or installing anything, start by going through these short online tutorials, in order:
dplyrggplot2The tutorials will give you a sense of how R works, and they will introduce to two key plug-ins or packages: dplyr for manipulating data, and ggplot2 for visualizing data. The tutorials run in the browser and require no installation.
After you’ve done the tutorials, install R (the language) and R Studio (the app to use the language). Then install the tidyverse – a universe of packages that make R easier to use. dplyr and ggplot2 are part of the tidyverse. Get started here and work your way down.
Why do we use the tidyverse? Two reasons.
First, it makes it easier to work with data – cleaning it, manipulating it, visualizing it, modeling it.
Second, and related to the first, the tidyverse is the future of R. About 50% of new developments in the R language are built on the tidyverse. It’s ease of use and it’s popularity is why the tidyverse is lingua franca in many industry roles like business analytics and data science.
SuffolkEcon packageWe also built a small package to help teach stats and econometrics. Learn more here!
This website was funded by a grant from the Center for Teaching and Scholarly Excellence at Suffolk University.
We would also like to thank the team at Suffolk University’s Information Technology Services for setting up our tutorial server.
This site was last updated 2021-06-01 15:25:02 EST.