R

Statistical Software Access From Home

Of all the stressors you’ve got right now, accessing your statistical software from home shouldn’t be one of them. (You know, the one on your office computer).

We’ve gotten some updates from some statistical software companies on how they’re making it easier to access the software you have a license to or to extend a free trial while you’re working from home.

Member Training: What’s the Best Statistical Package for You?

by guest contributer

Choosing statistical software is part of The Fundamentals of Statistical Skill and is necessary to learning a second software (something we recommend to anyone progressing from Stage 2 to Stage 3 and beyond).

You have many choices for software to analyze your data: R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata, among others. They are all quite good, but each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses.

The Advantages of RStudio

by Kim Love 4 Comments

There are multiple ways to interface with R. Some common interfaces are the basic R GUI, R Commander (the package “Rcmdr” that you use on top of the basic R GUI), and RStudio.

When I first started to learn to use R, I was bound and determined to use the basic R GUI.

As someone who was already used to programming in SAS, I wasn’t looking for a [Read more…] about The Advantages of RStudio

What Really Makes R So Hard to Learn?

by Kim Love 1 Comment

If you are like I was for a long time, you have avoided learning R.

You’ve probably heard that there’s a steep learning curve. Or noticed that the available documentation is not necessarily user-friendly.

Frankly, both things are true, to some extent.

R is Open-Source

The best and worst thing about R is that it is open-source. So there is no single [Read more…] about What Really Makes R So Hard to Learn?

Tricks for Using Word to Make Statistical Syntax Easier

by Karen Grace-Martin 2 Comments

We’ve talked a lot around here about the reasons to use syntax — not only menus — in your statistical analyses.

Regardless of which software you use, the syntax file is pretty much always a text file. This is true for R, SPSS, SAS, Stata — just about all of them.

This is important because it means you can use an unlikely tool to help you code: Microsoft Word.

I know what you’re thinking. Word? Really?

Yep, it’s true. Essentially it’s because Word has much better Search-and-Replace options than your stat software’s editor.

Here are a couple features of Word’s search-and-replace that I use to help me code faster:

R is Not So Hard! A Tutorial, Part 22: Creating and Customizing Scatter Plots

by guest contributer 1 Comment

by David Lillis, Ph.D.

In our last post, we calculated Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients in R and got a surprising result.

So let’s investigate the data a little more with a scatter plot.

We use the same version of the data set of tourists. We have data on tourists from different nations, their gender, number of children, and how much they spent on their trip.

Again we copy and paste the following array into R.

T <- structure(list(COUNTRY = structure(c(3L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 1L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 3L, 3L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 1L, 3L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("AUS", "JAPAN", "USA"), class = "factor"),GENDER = structure(c(2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("F", "M"), class = "factor"), CHILDREN = c(2L, 1L, 3L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 1L, 0L, 1L, 0L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 0L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 4L, 2L, 5L, 1L), SPEND = c(8500L, 23000L, 4000L, 9800L, 2200L, 4800L, 12300L, 8000L, 7100L, 10000L, 7800L, 7100L, 7900L, 7000L, 14200L, 11000L, 7900L, 2300L, 7000L, 8800L, 7500L, 15300L, 8000L, 7900L)), .Names = c("COUNTRY", "GENDER", "CHILDREN", "SPEND"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -24L))

T attach(T)

plot(CHILDREN, SPEND)