Course Topics
The ability to create professional grade graphics is of key importance for scientific communication. The R programming package offers a powerful, flexible, and free platform which can be used to produce publication-quality graphics. This short course will introduce R techniques to produce several statistical graphs including histograms, bar plots, box plots, and scatter plots among others. Syntax to control colors, plotting characters, axes, legends, and labels will be covered, and users will learn to write high resolution graphics to the file type of their choice. Two data sets will be used to demonstrate R’s graphical capabilities: The National Longitudinal Mortality data set and a data set about nutrition in breakfast cereals from DASL. The course format includes lecture and computer laboratory components. The lecture component will cover pros and cons of various graphics and approaches, and the computer portion will allow attendees to write, modify, and execute R codes to produce graphics based on these data.
This session is the third entry in a three course series which assumes no previous coding experience in R or any other language. The intended audience for this course includes researchers who want to gain basic exposure to R with the ultimate goal of incorporating R into their research programs.
Resources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
R can be downloaded here: www.r-project.org
RStudio can be downloaded here: http://rstudio.org/download/desktop
LISA Short Course: Graphics in R, Part I from LISA on Vimeo.
LISA Short Course: Graphics in R, Part II from LISA on Vimeo.