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
u/LiteratusSimiae
aReadingApe
