Introduction to R

Benjamin T. Carter, PhD

Collaborative Science & Innovation

Outline

  • Why use R?
  • How to use R (generally)

Why use R?

Why Use R?

  • It is integrated with Health Catalyst
  • It can handle all sorts of data
  • It is an established language with lots of libraries for data processing, ML, and document creation.

Use R because Dr. Thompson hates it.

Why Use R?

  • Automate the boring stuff
  • Scriptable programming language
  • Create HTML, Microsoft, TeX, and Dashboards
  • Machine Learning Libraries
  • Lots of development for Research purposes
  • APIs for sourcing data (e.g. Census API, NOAA API)
  • Weird data types like EEG, fMRI

How to use R?

Example Projects

Same Day Care Project

Processing and Augmentation Pipelines

Equine Trauma Project

Flexible Reports

ICU COVID-19

Reading data from SSMS to R

Tips and Tricks

  • Learn base R to avoid versioning issues on Health Catalyst
  • Learn dplyr & tidyverse
  • Use functions
  • Use the apply family of functions not for loops
  • Automate the boring stuff

Benjamin T. Carter, PhD

Collaborative Science & Innovation

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Introduction to R

Introduction to R

By Ben Carter

Introduction to R

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