BASICS

I. The R terminal
a. The R terminal is where the commands can be entered and the results
displayed
b. > R prompt means R is waiting for you to do something
i. 2+2
ii. 6*5
iii. # 3-2
c. Points to be noted –
i. Spaces don’t matter
ii. Standard arithmetic operators + , -, / are as expected
iii. All expressions followed by # are not evaluated as # is used to add a
comment in R programming

II. Assigning a value to a variable

a. Assignment operator in R is <- , - >and =
i. a <- 5
b. Remove rm() – To remove things from your workspace

III. Vectors
a. A vector is a sequence of data elements of the same basic type
b. Function –c – it concatenates values together.
c. sms < - c(0,1,2,0,0,0,1)
d. Function c is followed by parenthesis which contain the arguments to the
function.
e. All mathematical operations can be done on these vectors through R
f. sms +5
g. sms *5
 IV. Other functions
a. sd()
b. median()
c. max()
d. min ()
e. length() – number of elements in the vector
Exercises

1. The sum of 100.1, 234.9, 12.01 = Ans :347.01

2. Type codes for assigning 10 to variable x, 20 to variable y

 Calculate the product of x and y

 Store the result in a new object called z
 Inspect your workspace by typing ls(), and by clicking the Environment tab in
Rstudio
 Find the three objects you created.
 Make a vector of the objects x,y and z
 Find the minimum, maximum, length, and variance of the vector
 Remove the myvec object from your workspace.

3. The numbers below are the first ten days of rainfall amounts in centimeter. Read them into
a vector rainfall
0.1, 0.6, 33.8, 1.9, 9.6, 4.3, 33.7, 0.3, 0.0, 0.1

Answer the following questions:

 What was the mean rainfall, how about the standard deviation?
 Calculate the cumulative rainfall (running total) over these ten days. Confirm that the
last value of the vector that this produces is equal to the total sum of the rainfall.
 Which day saw the highest rainfall

4. Assume that we have registered the height and weight for four people: Heights in cm are
180, 165, 160, 193; weights in kg are 87, 58, 65, 100. Make two vectors height and weight with
the data. The body mass index (BMI) is defined as weight in kg/(height in m2). Make a vector
with the BMI values for the four people, and a vector with the natural logarithm to the BMI
values. Finally make a vector with the weights for those people who have a BMI larger than
25.