Chapter 1 Introduction

This course presents a 2-day introduction to data analysis and visualisation with R as well as certain programming topics. It is formatted as a bookdown document

The material can be accessed here:

The source code for this document is available on GitHub at

1.1 Installation

We will install required packages as we go along. Before the course, participants should install a recent version of R (ideally the current release version) and RStudio, or any other editor of their choice.

1.2 Programme

  • Morning: 9:30 - 13:00 (3 hours, with 30 min break)
  • Afternoon: 14:00 - 17:00 (3 hours, with a shorter break)

Day 1

  • Setup and introduction
  • Spreadsheets and tidy data
  • Data manipulation using the tidyverse
  • Visualisation with ggplot2
  • Reproducible research with Rmarkdown
  • Wrap-up

Day 2

  • R package development
  • Viz. of high-dimensional data (bit.ly/highdimvis)
  • Interactive visualisation: ggvis, shiny
  • Navigate and mine Bioconductor for useful scripting components
  • Wrap-up

Optional

  • R programming concepts and tools

1.3 License and credits

This material is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Some content is inspired by other sources, see the first paragraph in the respective chapters for credits.