Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics
Summer Institute in Statistics and Modeling of Infectious Diseases
Module 3: Introduction to R
Instructors: Ken Rice and Tim Thornton

This page will feature slides from our sessions, exercises for you to complete, and their solutions (all to follow). Prior to the module, please install up-to-date versions of R and RStudio on the laptop you will use during the summer institute. Both are free.

Slides and exercises

Script files are posted following each session; these will contain our R code for the exercises. To make them work on your computer, remember to modify file names and locations appropriately. Also note that many different 'correct' solutions are possible.

Session 1, Introductions, reading in data (exercises) (R script file)

Session 2, More data summary and using functions (exercises) (R script file)

Session 3, Plotting functions, and formulas (exercises) (R script file)

Session 4, Adding features to plots (exercises) (R script file)

Session 5, Over and over (exercises) (R script file)

Session 6, More loops, Control Structures, and Bootstrapping (exercises) (R script file)

Session 7, Fitting models (exercises) (R script file)

Session 8, Introduction to R packages (exercises) (R script file)

Special Exercise: This is a more in-depth programming problem, for you to try on Tuesday night; we'll discuss it in the final session. Click for some examples of growth and gliding -- produced in R.

Session 9, Writing functions exercises (.docx) (.pdf) (R script file)

Session 10, The End! No exercises for this session - but see this R script file for some ways to implement the Special Exercise. This script contains the fast, vectorized version, output as animated GIFs.

For easier searching, here are all the slides in one document (PDF).


Datasets - in alphabetical order

Before trying to read data into your R session, we recommend looking at it first, in a text editor. Is the data comma- or tab-delimited? Does it have a 'header' row containing variable names?


Other resources

Some recommended books;