Introduction to R#

Overview#

The R programming language

  • R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics

  • R is developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues.

  • R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.

  • R is available as Free Software

  • R runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS.

  • R can be extended (easily) via packages on CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network)