Thomas Mock is a Customer Success Representative at RStudio . He fell in love with R and data science through his PhD research, which he did in Neurobiology at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Thomas is passionate about growing the R community, and founded #TidyTuesday to help newcomers and seasoned vets improve their Tidyverse skills. In his home town of Dallas, Thomas and his wife run on the local trails, play with their Boston Terrier "Howard", spend lots of time with...
I often tell people that R can improve their workflow. But, as everyone knows, showing is better than telling. So, in that spirit, I made a video to demonstrate one way in which R can improve your efficiency. I often work with data from the U.S. Census Bureau. My old workflow was as follows: Go to the Census Bureau website Downloading the data I need Use the data to make charts in Excel Copy these charts into Word Write my report in Word Since I switched to R, I've been able to do all 5 steps...
I get asked this question a lot: is the work I do too b a sic to take advantage of R ? It’s a reasonable question given R’s reputation as a tool for the extremely quantitatively inclined . But R can do a ton for you even if your statistical analysis needs are simple. I only ever use R for descriptive stats , and I get a ton of value from it. People new to R often don’t realize everything that it makes possible on top of data anlaysis. In particular, RMarkdown makes reproducibility the norm so...
In choosing subjects for My R Journey interviews, I tend to stay away from statisticians. My mission with R for the Rest of Us is to demonstrate ways of using R that go beyond how many people expect R to be used (e.g. complex statistical models). But, if you know Sharla Gelfand , you know that they're not your typical statistician. Sharla is a statistician at the College of Nurses of Ontario , a freelance R and Shiny developer, and co-organizer of R-Ladies Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area...
I got an email the other day from someone who is interested in learning R, but has been scared off by what others have told her about it. Now, learning R is not "basically impossible," of course (if it were, no one would use it, which is most definitely not the case ). But this person's email gets at something that more experienced users forget: the learning curve for R is steep. I was also reminded of this in an email exchange with Ann, another new R user. She wrote: "I wish there was a step...
The default look and feel of figures made with ggplot leaves something to be desired. See that default gray background and you know the figure was made in ggplot, just as a 3D pie chart could only mean Excel. Fortunately, though, changing how your ggplot figures look is incredibly simple. In fact, it's usually just one line of code (and the range of things you can do with one line of code in R never ceases to amaze me ). Simply add theme_minimal() to turn the above plot into this: If you find...
Adrienne Zell wears many hats. She is an Assistant Professor in the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) – Portland State University (PSU) School of Public Health . She is also the Director and co-founder of the OHSU Evaluation Core , an Assistant Director for the Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute (OCTRI), and the Director of the OCTRI Office of Research Impact at OHSU . Adrienne’s team provides evaluation support and technical assistance to academic and...
If you care about issues of equity and you work with data, you should use R. Yes, a humble data analysis tool can play a small, if important, role in creating a more equitable society. The first way that you may connect R and equity is with who uses it. Proprietary software like SPSS, SAS, Stata, and the like can cost thousands of dollars, making them inaccessible for many living outside of the wealthiest countries. R is famously free. If you have a computer you can use it. Efforts like...
Do you conduct surveys? If so, you likely know the pain of having to continually remind people to complete your survey? What if you could automate this process so that you don't have to keep track of anything? In this video tutorial, I give an example of how you can use R to automate survey administration. People typically think of R as a tool for data analysis, which it of course is. But, with thousands and thousands of package that give R added functionalities, you can use several of them...
One of the things I've had most trouble explaining to folks learning R is the grammar of graphics . It's the theoretical underpinnings of the ggplot2 package, which is used to make all sorts of graphics. In general, I try to avoid being too theoretical in my courses and workshops , but the grammar of graphics is so key that you can't learn ggplot without understanding it. In putting together my Fundamentals of R course , I made this video to help my students learn the grammar of graphics. I...
