The first two (lecture) sessions are meant to provide a basic overview of and introduction to R, including to statistical modeling in R – in effect, using R as a statistical package. The following four to five workshop sessions pick up where the basic lectures leave off, and combine lecture material with hands-on experience. The workshop sessions are intended to provide the background required to use R seriously for data analysis and presentation, including an introduction to R programming and to the design of custom statistical graphs, unlocking the power in the R statistical programming environment. The topic for session 8 is flexible, depending upon participants’ interests: the topic given here is a suggestion. If the size of the group is sufficiently small, the workshops will be conducted in a computer lab. Otherwise, participants are encouraged to bring their laptops to the workshop sessions. Some slides for the workshop are available on-line.
| Lecture/Workshop |
Reading (in Fox and Weisberg's R Companion to Applied Regression, Second Edition) |
Materials |
| 1. Getting started with R | Ch. 1 | script, exercises,Tom Short's R reference card, Duncan.txt |
| 2. Statistical models in R | Ch. 4, 5 & appendices to the first edition | script, exercises, Prestige.txt, Powers.txt, Long.txt, Winer.txt, |
| 3. Data in R | Ch. 2 | script, exercises, nations.por, Datasets.xls |
| 4-6. R Programming | Ch. 8 | script, exercises, bugged functions |
| 7. R Graphics | Ch. 7 | script, exercises, graphs-solutions.R, symbols-colours.R, 3dplots.R |
| 8. Building R packages or another topic | Writing R Extensions manual; for Windows, Appendix D of R Installation and Administration manual | script, matrixDemos.R, matrixDemos_1.0.zip, matrix.Demos_1.0.tar.gz |
Install packages from CRAN menu in the RGui
console.
Packages Installer menu in the R.app or R64.app console.install.packages("car",
repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org"), but first install the leaps package, on which car depends, from CRAN -- either via menus or by the command install.packages("leaps").
The principal source for this lecture series/workshop is J. Fox and S. Weisberg, An R Companion to Applied Regression, Second Edition, Sage (manuscript), which will be made available to participants. Additional materials are available on the web site for the first edition of the book, including several appendices (on structural-equation models, mixed models, survival analysis, etc.). The book is associated with the car package for R. Alternatively (or additionally), more advanced students may wish to use W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley, Modern Applied Statistics with S as a principal source.
R is distributed with a set of manuals, which are also available at the CRAN web site.
A
manual for S-PLUS Trellis Graphics (also useful for the lattice package in
R) is at also available
on the web.
R. A.
Becker, J. M. Chambers, and A .R. Wilks, The
New S Language: A Programming Environment for Data Analysis and
Statistics.
J. M.
Chambers, Programming with Data: A Guide to the S Language.
J. M. Chambers, Software for Data Analysis: Programming with R. New York: Springer, 2008. Chambers’s newest book ranges quite widely, and emphasizes a deep understanding of the R language, along with object-oriented programming, and links between R and other software. Some topics are unusual, such as processing text data in R.
J. M.
Chambers and T.J. Hastie, eds., Statistical
Models in
R. Gentleman, R Programming for Bioinformatics, Boca Raton: Chapman and Hall, 2009. A thorough, though at points relatively difficult, treatment of programming in R, by one of the original co-developers of R and a founder of the related Bioconductor Project (which develops computing tools for the analysis of genomic data). Don’t let the title fool you: Most of the book is of general interest to R programmers.
R. Ihaka and R. Gentleman, “R: A language for data analysis and graphics.” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 5:299-314, 1996. The original published description of the R project, now quite out of date but still worth looking at.
W. N.
Venables and B. D. Ripley, S Programming.
The following three books treat traditional topics in statistical computing, such as optimization, simulation, probability calculations, and computational linear algebra, using R (although the coverage of particular topics in the books differs). All offer introductions to R programming. Of these books, Braun and Murdoch is the briefest and most accessible.
W. J. Braun and D. J. Murdoch, A First Course in Statistical Programming with R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
O. Jones, R. Maillardet, and A. Robinson, Introduction to Scientific Programming and Simulation Using R. Boca Raton: Chapman and Hall, 2009.
M. L. Rizzo. Statistical Computing with R, Boca Raton: Chapman and Hall, 2008.
P.
Murrell. R Graphics.
P. Murrell and R. Ihaka, “An approach to providing mathematical annotation in plots.” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 9:582-599, 2000. One of the unusual and very useful features of R graphics is the ability to include mathematical notation. This article explains how.
D. Sarkar, Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization with R. New York: Springer, 2008. Deepayan Sarkar is the developer of the powerful lattice package in R, which implements Trellis graphics. This book provides a fine introduction to and overview of lattice graphics. Figures from the book and the R code to produce them are available on the web.
H. Wickham, ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. New York: Springer, 2009. A guide to Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 package, which provides an alternative graphics system for R based on an extension of Wilkinson's The Grammer of Graphics (Second Edition, Springer, 2005), which, in turn, provides a systematic basis for constructing statistical graphs.
P.
Spector, Data Manipulation with R.
New York: Springer, 2008. Data management is a dry subject, but the
ability to
carry it out is vital to the effective day-to-day use of R (or of any
statistical software). Spector provides a reasonably broad and clear
introduction to the subject.
Also see the package listing on CRAN and the various CRAN "task views."
W. Bowman and A. Azzalini, Applied Smoothing Techniques for Data Analysis: The Kernel Approach with S-Plus Illustrations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. A good introduction to nonparametric density estimation and nonparametric regression, associated with the sm package (for both S-PLUS and R).
C. Davison and D. V. Hinkley, Bootstrap Methods and their Application. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. A comprehensive introduction to bootstrap resampling, associated with the boot package (written by A. J. Canty). Somewhat more difficult than Efron and Tibshirani (immediately below).
B. Efron and R. J. Tibshirani, An Introduction to the Bootstrap. London: Chapman and Hall, 1993. Another extensive treatment of bootstrapping by its originator (Efron), also accompanied by an R package, bootstrap (but somewhat less usable than boot).
A. Gelman and J. Hill, Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A wide-ranging yet deep treatment of hierarchical models and various related topics, predominantly but not exclusively from a Bayesian perspective, using both R and BUGS software.
F. E. Harrell, Jr., Regression Modeling Strategies, With Applications to Linear Models, Logistic Regression, and Survival Analysis. New York: Springer, 2001. Describes an interesting approach to statistical modeling, with frequent references to Harrell's Hmisc and Design packages.
T. J. Hastie and R. J. Tibshirani, Generalized Additive Models. London: Chapman and Hall, 1990. An accessible treatment of generalized additive models, as implemented in the gam package, and of nonparametric regression analysis in general. [The gam function in the mgcv package in R takes a somewhat different approach; see Wood (2000), below.]
R. Koenker, Quantile Regression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Describes a variety of methods for quantile regression by the leading figure in the area. The methods are implemented in Koenker's quantreg package for R.
C. Loader, Local Likelihood and Regression. New York: Springer, 1999. Another text on nonparametric regression and density estimation, using the locfit package. Although the text is less readable than Bowman and Azzalini, the locfit software in very capable.
T. Lumley, Complex Surveys: A Guide to Analysis Using R. Hoboken NJ, Wiley, 2010. A lucid introduction to the analysis of data from complex survey samples and to Lumley's highly capable survey package.
J. C. Pinheiro and D. M. Bates, Mixed-Effects Models in S and S-PLUS. New York: Springer, 2000. An extensive treatment of linear and nonlinear mixed-effects models in S, focused on the authors' nlme package. Mixed models are appropriate for various kinds of non-independent (clustered) data, including hierarchical and longitudinal data. Does not cover Bates's newer lme4 package.
T. M. Therneau and P. M. Grambsch, Modeling Survival Data: Extending the Cox Model. New York, Springer: 2000. An overview of both basic and advanced methods of survival analysis (event-history analysis), with reference to S and SAS software, the former implemented in Therneau's state-of-the-art survival package.
W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley. Modern Applied Statistics with S, Fourth Edition. New York: Springer, 2002. An influential and wide-ranging treatment of data analysis using S. Many of the facilities described in the book are programmed in the associated (and indispensable) MASS, nnet, and spatial packages, which are included in the standard R distribution. This text is more advanced and has a broader focus than the R Companion.
S. N.
Wood, Generalized
Additive Models: An Introduction with R. New York: Chapman
and Hall, 2006. Describes the mgcv
package in R, which contains a gam function
for fitting generalized additive models based on smoothing splines. The
initials "mgcv" stand for multiple generalized cross validation, the
method by which Wood selects GAM smoothing parameters.
See the publications list on the R web site. The R Journal, the journal of the R Project for Statistical Computing, and its predecessor R News, are also good sources of information, as is the Journal of Statistical Software, an on-line American Statistical Association journal dominated by coverage of R packages..
Last Modified: 1 July 2010 by J. Fox <jfox AT mcmaster.ca>