jldc / intro-to-r

MEcon Introductory Week

A Brief Introduction to Programming with R

This course introduces students to the fundamental practices of programming with R in the context of economic research. The course briefly covers basic theoretical concepts and teaches basic skills in how to make use of the high-level programming language and statistical computing environment R. Examples and exercises are focused on data handling and data analysis tasks. The overall aim is to give students a solid overview of basic programming in R, and how they can potentially make use of R during their studies and research in economics.

Course Files

Download ZIP file with the necessary course data and files.

Course Slides

• Part I: Background / Tools
• Part II: First Steps and Basic Concepts
• Part III: Working with Data

Course Structure

Part I: Background & tools

• Why R? Why programming?
• The tools: R, RStudio/Posit.

Part II: First steps in R, core concepts

• First steps in R: R as a calculator, variables.
• Basic programming concepts in R.
• R objects and data structures.
• R functions for basic statistics.

Part III: Working with data in R

• Loading/importing data.
• Visualizing data with R/ggplot.
• Basic data analysis with R.

Schedule

Time	Content
09:15 - 10:00	Introduction, Background, Tools
10:00 - 10:15	Break, support with installations
10:15 - 11:00	Exercises, first steps with R
11:00 - 11:15	Break, Q&A
11:15 - 12:00	First steps with R, concepts
12:00 - 13:15	Lunch break (individually)
13:15 - 14:00	Exercises
14:00 - 14:15	Break, Q&A
14:15 - 15:30	Working with data

Credits

All credits for the contents of the course go to Prof. Ph.D. Ulrich Matter.