Speaking ‘R’ - The Language of Data Science

In this video course, we start by focusing on R's similarities with programming languages such as basic/C/C# with loops and conditional tests like if, so that you can feel at home and be productive straight away.

We begin by introducing R and setting things up so that you are ready to go using Rstudio, the associated IDE. Then we look at R as a programming language and see how the standard things are done in it, so you can see that it’s not that different from other programming languages. Next, we introduce some R commands, which are very useful and not as common in traditional languages since manipulating data is more important in R.

Moving on, we look at an example in the Titanic dataset, which is the kind of thing you’ll come across in R, a multidimensional collection of variables of different types. Using the tools that we cover we can form a picture, a story behind the data.

We then look at cleaning up data, which is what 80% of data science is - as we rarely get a nice neat set of numbers, but mostly unstructured junk. This is just trial and error, gradually getting to something we can work with.

Finally, we cover statistics, which is where R originated and what it was designed for.We begin doing some basic statistics with R to show how it works and end up using various special features for data visualization.

About the Author :

Dr. Samik Sen is a Theoretical Physicist and loves hard problems to think about. After his Phd, which was about developing computational methods to solve problems for which no solutions existed, he began thinking about how to tackle the maths problem while lecturing. He developed algorithms to generate problem sets and solutions, and learned how to create video lessons.

He has developed a large Facebook community teaching school maths around Ireland, with associated e-learning products and YouTube channel. Samik is currently fascinated by machine and deep Learning.He has developed a machine learning system which is performing better than he can himself which was the hope.

He also has a YouTube channel associated with data science, which provides valuable engagement with people round the world who look at problems from a different perspective.