Probability and Statistics

Get started with R

How to install R. R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics, which is similar to S-Plus. It is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License. The system runs on Windows, Linux, Mac. You can download it from CRAN R project which has software packages for Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac.

R Studio. On top of R you may want to use R Studio. It is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. Follow their instruction to download and install DESKTOP R STUDIO in your PC.

What is R? R is a programming language, and runs a “command” in an interactive manner, known as “interpretor.” Each command is requested in a form of “function”: For example, it is the function q() to quit the program.

> q()

Use it as a calculator. We can execute arithmetic operations at the prompt. For example, $8^4 \times 12^3$ can be performed by typing

> 8^4 * 12^3

Computation of factorials and combinations can be done by using the function factorial() and choose(). For example, you can obtain and $\displaystyle\binom{20}{8}$ by

> factorial(16)
> choose(20,8)