An Introduction to R

"This is coming back to the idea of large data. R is open source software that enables you to do statistical analysis, mathematical equations, and some programming as well. R was in fact introduced to me by Dr James Brenton, my PhD supervisor. When I joined him as his first student, he was just starting the lab and he knew how to use R, but nobody else in the lab did. Since then, I’ve become a huge fan of R, and of James, of course. You can just download it from the internet and you’ve got something that’s extremely powerful at your fingertips and free of charge. You need to know how to use the command line properly, which you can teach yourself, or go on courses. This book, The Introduction to R , got me started learning about R, and I now recommend it to all my students. Any data that is presented in table format you can import into R, and then do data analysis with it. That, of course, now includes any of the big data sources. What we use it for a lot in my lab is to analyse DNA or RNA sequencing data, to look for mutations, or for gene expression, and correlate those with disease outcomes. Editor’s note: If you would like to make a donation to Ovarian Cancer Action and the research they fund you can do so here."