Introduction to R

Children’s Mercy Hospital

---

📆 February 28, 2025

⏰ 8 am - 5 pm

💻 Workshop Github

---

Setup

The workshop will be hosted in person at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. Please come with R and RStudio already installed on your computer.

Slides

• Introduction and R and Rmarkdown
• Data Manipulation I and II
• Visualization with ggplot
• Statistical testing
• Best practices

Code

Find our live coded notes in notes/ as we commit them.

Questions?

Feel free to ask questions in the GitHub Issues.

Overview

This is a 1 day workshop designed to introduce future users to R and Rstudio. We will cover data cleaning using the tidyverse, creating visuals with ggplot, basic statistical analysis and writing documents with Rmarkdown. In the end you should be able to:

• import and manipulate data into different formats
• create new variables and recode existing ones
• plot data using the appropriate figure type
• perform basic statistics
• write Rmarkdown reports

Who is this course designed for?

Have you never written any code in R or any other programming language? Are you familiar with R, but hoping to bulk up your basic skills? Have you used R but are new to the tidyverse framework?

Learning objectives

Introduction to R/Rstudio and Rmarkdown

• Get familiar with the R and Rstudio environment
• Understand basic R code structure (packages, data structures)
• Create and render Rmarkdown documents in multiple formats

Data import and manipulation - Part I

• Import various data types
• Explain the fundamentals of “tidy data” and the tidyverse
• Clean data sets using dplyr verbs

Data manipulation and cleaning - Part II

• Merge data sets
• Transform data

Visualization

• Understand the principles of ggplot2
• Determine appropriate visualizations
• Plot - geom_smooth to see a model over the data

Basic statistics

• ttest, correlation and chisq
• Model data
• Report findings from R output

Materials/RStudio Cloud

Materials will be made available on GitHub. If you are using an organization-issued laptop, you may want to verify before you arrive that you can access GitHub.

Schedule

• 08:00 - 08:15 - Welcome
• 08:15 - 09:00 - Intro to R and Github
• 09:00 - 10:00 - Data import and clean
• 10:00 - 10:15 - Break
• 10:15 - 11:30 - Data cleaning continued
• 11:30 - 12:30 - Intro to ggplot2
• 12:30 - 01:30 - Lunch
• 01:30 - 02:30 - Statistical testing of means
• 02:30 - 03:15 - Regression modeling
• 03:15 - 03:30 - Break
• 03:30 - 04:30 - Categorical data analysis
• 04:30 - 05:00 - Rmarkdown (time allowing)

Instructors

This workshop is taught by Jordan Creed and Alex Soupir and sponsored by Brooke Fridley.

Additional resources

• R for Data Science
• Cheatsheets

---