Competing with Analytics

BUSINESS 4469 - Fall 2022

R-

Hamid Elahi
Ivey Business School, Western University
helahi.phd@ivey.ca
Agenda
• Introduction to R

• Setting up your workspace

• R basics

• Some exercises

2
What is R?

• Open source statistical programming language

• Designed to be an interactive language for
manipulation and analysis of data
• Strong alternative to commercial packages
• Stata, SAS, SPSS
• Free
• No licensing issues
• No platform issues
• Strong community
• Can find anything you want online (just google!)

3
R vs. Excel

• R can handle larger datasets

• R provides larger suite of analysis tools
• If there is an alternative in Excel
• R version will have simpler/more efficient interface
• R version run faster
• MUCH easier to reproduce analysis in R
• MUCH easier to reuse parts of previous
analysis in R
• . . . but excel is pretty good for data entry
4
What can we do with R?

• Everything!
• analysis: statistics, data exploration, machine
learning
• data visualization
• non-standard data: text mining, network analysis
• Support for lots of data formats
• CSV, databases (e.g. mysql, mongodb)
• Quickly connect to many datasources
• twitter, google maps…

5
RStudio
• Use an integrated development environment
• RStudio
• RStudio is an integrated development environment
(IDE)
• IDE= UI which simplifies common development tasks
• Focused on R and interactive programming with data
• Puts everything you need to work in R in a convenient
place
• Run code interactively
• View data, plots
• Edit source files
• Manage packages (external libraries)