There was excellent demand from across the country for the R Course at the CGU/CWRA meeting, but many from the U. of S. were unable to make it – so the Centre for Hydrology is giving an informal Introduction to R for Hydrologists class in late August for U. of S. faculty, staff and students who would like to start using this highly productive toolset in their hydrological calculations.
By Whom? Dr Kevin Shook, a research scientist with the Centre, who gave part of the R class to CGU
For Whom? Open only to U. of S. faculty, staff and students
How many? The first 80 people through the door will get a place!
When? Begins 9am, Thursday August 29th: continues all day
Where? Room 144 of Kirk Hall
In the spirit of open source software, the course will be
i) Free – no registration required
ii) Unofficial
iii) Open to any member of U. of S. faculty, staff or student body
The course will cover the following topics:
1. Getting started
– what R is and how it works
– getting and installing R
– getting help
– using the command line
– using the GUI
2. Using R
– data types
– commands
– importing/exporting data
– doing calculations
3. Graphs
– simple graphs
– special purpose graphs
– exporting graphs
– advanced graphing with ggplot2
4. Commonly used commands
– common statistical functions
– dealing with bad/missing data
– subsetting data
– aggregating data
5. Advanced
– linear models (regressions)
– writing R functions
– debugging
– accessing WISKI data from R
No background in R or programming is required. The course will be taught with demonstrations, so you are strongly encouraged to bring your laptop and work along. There is no credit or examination associated with this informal course – you will get out of it what you put into it.
You can download R from cran.stat.sfu.ca, and should load it and try it out before the course. R is most easily used with a GUI: probably the easiest and best is RStudio.