Statistics in R
Joost van de Weijer, Dylan Glynn · Human cognitive processing · 2014
The R Project for Statistical Computing is one of the most comprehensive and widely used software options for statistical analysis. Moreover, it is open source, freely available and entirely cross-platform. It is for these reasons that the following chapters all employ R to demonstrate the application and interpretation of statistics. Like the commercially available software SAS, but unlike three other widely used suites (SPSS, Stata, and Statistica), R is principally used in command line. The need to work with commands rather than a graphical user interface can be a challenge for novice users, especially when combined with the task of learning statistics. However, commands given in a step-by-step fashion is arguably simpler than a graphic interface, which can overwhelm the novice user with options. This chapter is an introduction to R focusing on how to import data and make sure those data are in the correct format for analysis. Knowledge of each of these steps is assumed in the following chapters.