About the SBE R Training

Purpose

What to Expect

The purpose of this course is to provide a gentle introduction to R suitable for academic staff members. The main target group is teachers and researchers who teach or use some form of data analysis / statistics in their courses, but are unfamiliar with R, for example because they have been using software like SPSS, Excel or Stata for their statistical analysis.

What Not to Expect

  • Basic statistical training. Participants are expected to have a basic understanding of statistics.
  • Advanced use of R that requires substantial programming. While we may touch upon this briefly depending on the interests of the participants, more advanced treatment is outside the scope of the training.

Sessions

We have scheduled 5 hands-on sessions of 2 hours each. The sessions are interactive, guided by two of the trainers, with plenty of opportunity for asking questions and further interactions. No preparation is needed outside of these sessions. The focus will be on understanding the language conceptually, rather than covering a wide range of statistical tools.

Content

  1. Tuesday June 9, 13:30-15:30: First Steps in R
    The first session will discuss how to get R and RStudio up and running. Next, we will cover the basics to get R working, specifically, how to use the console, write scripts and how to load data into R from different types of sources.

  2. Thursday June 11, 13:30-15:30: R Objects
    Using different types of objects is at the heart of R. This session will go into the different type of objects that users encounter, such as vectors, lists and data frames.

  3. Monday June 15, 13:30-15:30: Using Functions and Packages
    When using R as a statistical tool rather than a programming language, proper use of built-in functions and packages is key. This session will cover how to use general functions, explain the way arguments should be entered, and how output objects should be interpreted. We discuss the philosophy of R’s object-oriented system, and show how operations can be performed on different type of objects. We also go into the package management system.

  4. Wednesday June 17, 10:30-12:30: Graphics
    In the session, we cover how to make professional figures and plots using R’s graphical capabilities. To this end, we will frequently revisit how to load data into R from different types of sources and how to export results from an analysis from R to other programs.

  5. Friday June 19, 10:30-12:30: Data Manipulation and (Regression) Analysis
    The first part of the session will focus on typical manipulations of data stats that may be needed as preprocessing steps before a statistical analysis. The second part of the session we will apply some basic statistical analysis tools. We focus on the linear regression model, the workhorse of empirical economic research. To enable practitioners to efficiently estimate the linear regression model in R, we cover objects of class formula and OLS estimation via the lm() command.

Optional Topics

Depending on the progress and interests of the participants, we have 2 optional more advanced topics, that can be integrated into the sessions:

  • Advanced Graphics: This topic covers more advanced use of R’s graphics capabilities such as the ggplot2 package.

  • Flow Control: Often we want to execute certain commands conditionally and / or repeatedly. This requires conditional evaluation and loops, which are covered under the topic of flow control.

Preparation

First Meeting

Participants are asked to install R and RStudio prior to the first session but we can still cover installation if problems occur. Do bring your laptop to each session. Preparation for the remaining sessions is not needed.

Missed Meetings

For people attending all sessions, no preparation is needed between the sessions. For people missing sessions, we strongly recommend going through the material on your own, as sessions build up consecutively. As we are still finetuning the content, we cannot promise to have the sessions complete and available more than a day before each session. If this is a problem, please contact us directly to see what we can do.