Before attempting any of these projects, you will need to set up your programming environment. All of these projects are written using the R programming language and will require R Studio along with some other packages.
The first step is to install the R programming language. The R programming
language is a high-level language designed specifically for statistics and
data visualization.
Download R here. Select your operating system, and follow the instructions provided.
After you have successfully installed R, you will need to install R Studio. R Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) specifically designed for the R programming language.
IDEs can be thought of as word processors for code. R Studio provides users with syntax highlighting, package management, autocomplete, and many other features that make it easier to write code.
Download R Studio here. Select your operating system, and follow the instructions provided.
We will be using tidyverse in all of the projects. tidyverse is a software
bundle that contains many commonly used packages. These are not included with
R by default and must be installed.
In order to install tidyverse, type the following command into your R console
and hit enter.
install.packages("tidyverse")
tidyverse is a large package and may take time to download.
To use tidyverse in an R script, you have to load it into your environment
using the library function. Take the following example.
library(tidyverse)
Tidy Tuesday is a GitHub repository that publishes open datasets every Tuesday for anyone to download and analyze. You can visit Tidy Tuesday here.
Tidy Tuesday has a R package that makes it easier to access weekly data
challenges. You can install the tidytuesday2 in R Studio. Type the following
command in your R console and click enter.
install.packages("tidytuesday2")