R Notes

R is popular among statisticians and biologists. It is one of the most commonly used languages in data analysis.

Basics

R’s basic syntax is C-like. There are a few special usages compared to other languages:

1. <- is R’s way to express assign a value to a variable. It can also direct the other way, i.e. ->. Sometimes it is equivalent to =, but in some places only <- is allowed. The recommended way is to use <- and forget that equals is ever allowed.
2. <-- is R’s global assigner. It can set global variables in a local scope.
3. c() is for combine scalars into vectors.
4. list() is for creating a collection with multiple object types (similar to tuple in other languages).
5. R’s vectorization is similar to MATLAB, but not strictly consistent. If you attempt to use a non-vectorized function on a vector, you will get warnings. apply() is like map() in Julia. There are more functions in the apply family.
6. R uses one-based indexes (GREAT!).
7. Integers in R are shown as e.g. 2L. 3 is assumed to be the same as 3.0, i.e. numeric.
8. Terminating R expressions: R doesn’t need semicolons to end a line of code (while it’s possible to put multiple commands on a single line separated by semicolons, you don’t see that very often). Instead, R uses line breaks (i.e., new line characters) to determine when an expression has ended.
9. Last but not least, R is a case-sensitive language, consistent with the trend in most modern languages.

Popular Packages

• ggplot2: grammar of graphics. The most famous package in the R community.

library(ggplot2)

# Delete the points outside the limits
g + xlim(c(0, 0.1)) + ylim(c(0, 1000000))
ggplot(midwest, aes(x=area, y=poptotal)) + 
  geom_point(col="steelblue", size=3) + # Add scatter points
  geom_smooth(method="lm") + # Add smoothing layer with a linear model "lm"
  coord_cartesian(xlim=c(0,0.1), ylim=c(0, 1000000)) + # Zoom in
  labs(title="Area Vs Population", subtitle="From midwest dataset", y="Population", x="Area", caption="Midwest Demographics") # Add titles and axis labels

• tidyverse: providing a complete and consistent set of tools for working with functions and vectors.

library(purrr)

mtcars |> 
  split(mtcars$cyl) |>  # from base R
  map(\(df) lm(mpg ~ wt, data = df)) |> 
  map(summary) %>%
  map_dbl("r.squared")
#>         4         6         8 
#> 0.5086326 0.4645102 0.4229655

This example illustrates some of the advantages of purrr functions over the equivalents in base R:

• The first argument is always the data, so purrr works naturally with the pipe.

• All purrr functions are type-stable. They always return the advertised output type (map() returns lists; map_dbl() returns double vectors), or they throw an error.

• All map() functions accept functions (named, anonymous, and lambda), character vector (used to extract components by name), or numeric vectors (used to extract by position).

Advanced R

The tricks are more-or-less similar to MATLAB and Python, such as vectorization, lazy evaluation, and integrating faster languages like C++. See more in Advanced R.