R: The Programming Language

Hey, I was learning the programming language R, and learnt a couple of new things. (I actually learnt most about R from the book: ‘An Introduction to Data Science.’ Feel free to read it for yourself.)

First off, ‘R’ is a programming language which is built purely for statistics and data. Many formulas that are used to analyze data (such as the formula for finding a standard deviation, a mean, etc) are compressed into a single code, which saves a bunch of time.

R is an open-source program, meaning that you can download it for free. (If you are struggling to download R, simply search ‘How to download R’ on YouTube.)

Since there are so many codes in R, I will not discuss these, rather I will discuss the power of R; what it has the ability to do. (At least, what I have learnt until now.)

R can fully analyze a dataset, some of the basics it can do is: Finding the mean, median, range, standard deviation, and much more. It can also ‘summarize’ a dataset. Most times, large data is hard to visualize or understand if it’s just a bunch of numbers on a screen. For example, if you have a dataset containing the population of each and every city in the world, it can be quite hard to see what’s going on. However, by ‘summarizing’ the data set, it reports the minimum value, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile, and the maximum value, which can help you understand the data much better.

Furthermore, R can also create a table (known as a data frame in R) with the data you give it. It also has the power to create a histogram with a very simple line of code. A histogram of the populations, for instance, would show how many cities have a population between a value and another value. For example, 15 cities with a population between 100,000 and 200,000.

To learn more about R, and actually coding in it, you can check out many YouTube videos available online, or the book: ‘An Introduction to Data Science.’