We host short courses for researchers and students in Africa and globally. Recent courses have included

| Introduction to R: Management, Exploration, and Communication of Data

Course overview

R is an open-source, statistical software platform that is growing in popularity due to its rapidly expanding amount of libraries containing cutting-edge statistical functions, as well as the user-friendly, built-in communication tools in RStudio. Course participants will not only be introduced to the basics of programming in R, but they will also learn how import and clean data in addition to visualising and reporting results. Specific topics that will be covered include: importing data; reshaping/tidying data; merging/joining datasets; handling dates, transforming numeric and categorical variables and summarizing data with plots and tables.

Course Outline

Participants will learn the basics of:

• Base R programming and coding style
• Data importation into and exportation out of RStudio
• Data cleaning/tidying into a format suitable for analysis (using tidyverse packages like dplyr and tidyr)
• Data analysis using basic descriptive statistics
• Data exploration and visualization using ggplot 2 and a combination of R packages for plotting and summarising data and a sneak peek into creating reproducible, dynamic reports using RMarkdown

Target audience

The course is suitable for graduate students or professionals who are familiar with statistical analysis and have managed or interacted with datasets using other software platforms