Exploratory Data Analysis Using R

The goal of this certificate is straightforward: to introduce participants to the programming language R and how to use it for data analysis. Participants will become familiar with the fundamental design principles of replication, blocking, randomization, and sequential problem solving. Ethical considerations of experimentation will also be discussed. Participants will use the statistical software R in this certificate.

The learning outcomes of this certificate program are:

1) Understand the strengths and weaknesses of using R;

2) Be able to search for, download, install and maintain packages;

3) Use functions from specific packages whether those packages are loaded or not;

4) Understand the pitfalls associated with functional masking;

5) Confidently create and manipulate R data structures;

6) Understand data types and coercion;

7) Be able to subset data structures;

8) Use RMarkdown to create pdf documents for consumption by a general audience;

9) Be able to import csv and txt data;

10) Employ the tidyr and dplyr package for advanced data manipulation;

11) Use the magrittr for writing code using piping notation;

12) Be able to use R to generate standard numerical and visual summaries of data, including the five-number summary, box-and-whiskers plots, histograms, kernel density histograms;

13) Understand how to correctly and effectively use the above-mentioned standard numerical and visual summaries of data;

14) Create advanced graphics using the ggplot2 package;