This Forbes post on the greatness that is R is being passed around by every statistician and his mother today.
It’s not that this type of analysis wasn’t possible before — statisticians have existed, and commercial software has been available to support them, for decades. The fact that R is free to use, free to modify, and its source is open to view, extend and improve means students, stock traders-in-training and fantasy football junkies can familiarize themselves with the software. They can write programs against it. They’re likely to continue that usage into their professional lives. When they share their work, the community, down the line, benefits. And the virtuous cycle strengthens.
What’s your favorite (graphical) use of R?
library(ggplot2)
ggplot2, combined with plyr and reshape and you have a whole load of manipulation and visualisation covered.
So where do I start learning R?
Amen to this! Is there a “classic” first text for R noobs?
Actually yes, there is, but it´s in spanish. “Analisis de datos en Psicologia. Haztelo en R.”
Some tutorials would be a good place:
https://flowingdata.com/category/tutorials/
USGS has a pretty good intro webinar-based course at http://www.fort.usgs.gov/brdscience/learnR.htm and you can use their tutorials without being part of the webinar.
If I already know Python/SQL would it still be worth my while to learn R?
Yeah it’d be really easy to pick up
I’ve never used it, but RPY allows you to access R from Python. I’m not sure if there’s a significant advantage to using R this way or not, but it is probably worth looking into.
My favorite tool is library(sas).
Works great, you should try in.
I’ll have to try that one.
Anyone know what procedure was used to create the awesome graphic on the Forbes post? Are there any demo examples of this procedure?
Follow the links (of the graphic itself), they take you to John Fox’s web-site which has an introduction to R along with code/scripts for generating graphs, my guess would be its one of those.
I like using R to baffle and amaze people, when I show people the UI under Emacs/ESS few people can comprehend using command line interfaces and expect to have menus and so forth for doing the analysis. Favourite package which is sort of graphical related is Sweave for its ability to embed R code into LaTeX for presentation and self-documentation.
I like the hex bin, its not something I’ve been able to duplicate in Excel or other software. Although I have yet to present it to a client because it seems messy, its interesting for my own person data exploration.
I don’t have a favorite package in R, but I use it for almost everything by default. And when I’m not using R, it’s Perl. STATA is pretty useful too.
Open source and free sound good, and the
R examples look fantastic. Yet does R have any
practical application for web display? It seems
all the graph examples on the web are non-interactive
and static images? (Sorry, I know next to nothing about R…. )
Take a look at rapache for programming web apps with R, http://rapache.net/
As for interactive web graphics, one of the many Jacascript libraries is a better bet, as they run in the browser. While R is good for data graphics, its real strength is on the analysis side.
Thanks for the shout-out, Nathan.
The conversation on the R post has great examples of the excellent work being done.
bearman’s link here, to the USGS “Learn R By Example” course, looks great.
Sure, Steve. Thanks for writing that up.
I think you meant this USGS link: http://www.fort.usgs.gov/brdscience/learnRE.htm
I googled ‘R by example’ first, and this came up, which I think might also be helpful:
http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/KB/R/index.html
http://learnr.wordpress.com/ is a fantastic resource – amazing variety of examples that are very well documented.
ggplot2.
I would point out this site: http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/all.html
It’s very heavy on statistics and statistical graphics, but it is full of example R code.