One-day course on the Dissemination of Results of Research with the R programming language

Hynds Lab

Department of Epidemiology and Public Health

St. Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place

Imperial College London, London

9:30 - 17:00, 29 February 2008

Course outline

This course is proposed to train research staff and Ph.D. students in the development of R packages. R packages are extensions and complements for the R programming which provide statistical methods not included with the main programme. In addition, to the statistical functions, R packages include manual pages with a detailed description of the functions and their use. Data sets can also be included and worked examples can be inserted in the manual pages.

Hence, R packages provide a suitable framework for the dissemination of research. First of all, because they offer an implementation of statistical methods and, furthermore, they include documentation and examples that can be used to illustrate the utilitity of the methods and for teaching purposes.

Recent versions of R allow the creation of vignettes, which are short articles with worked examples. The aim of the vignettes is to complement the manual pages by including examples in a more technical format such as LaTeX. Vignettes can be written using Sweave which is a system to include R chunks within LaTeX documents so that when it is compiled the R code is executed and results and plots are automatically inserted in the document.

This course is part of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods trainning activities and it has been organised by the BIAS Node (Imperial College London).

Course requirements

All participants must have a working knowledge of \R and \LaTeX. No prior experience with \R packages is required.

A computer lab will be needed for the practicals. In principle, a working \R installation will be needed as well and a few packages must be installed prior to the course. It is advice that attendats bring their own laptops because some additional (free) software may be installed.

Summary of course contents

Lecture: Introduction to the R packaging system (9:30-10:30)
Pre-Practical: Software required to make R packages (10:30-11:00)
Practical: Managing R packages (10:30-12:00)
Practical: Creation of R packages (14:00-15:00)
Lecture: Introduction to Sweave (15:00-16:00)
Practical: Development of documents with Sweave (16:00-17:00)

Course organiser and instructor

Dr. Virgilio Gómez-Rubio (course instructor), Imperial College London

Course materials

Lecture notes

R

R software and packages
This is the main site to download R and the packages that we will use in the course.

Software required for Windows
In order to build R packages in Windows you will need to download and install theRtools bundle from here. Read also the instructions therein to make a suitable installation and configuration of these tools. Note that this will also be discussed in the pre-practical session.

An Introduction to R (HTML, PDF)
Introductory tutorial to R, ideal for beginners. It contains a description of data types, commands, etc. and how to make basic statistical analysis.

Writing R Extensions (HTML, PDF)
This document contains a full description of the way R packages can be created.

Other introductions on how to make Rpackages