R is a
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
for
statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians
Ross Ihaka and
Robert Gentleman, R is used among
data miners,
bioinformaticians and
statisticians for
data analysis and developing
statistical software. Users have created packages to augment the functions of the R language.
According to user surveys and studies of scholarly literature databases, R is one of the most commonly used programming languages used in data mining. R ranks 12th in the
TIOBE index, a measure of programming language popularity, in which the language peaked in 8th place in August 2020.
The official R software environment is an open-source
free software environment within the
GNU package, available under the
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...
. It is written primarily in
C,
Fortran, and R itself (partially
self-hosting). Precompiled
executables are provided for various
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
s. R has a
command line interface.
Multiple third-party
graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...
s are also available, such as
RStudio, an
integrated development environment
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...
, and
Jupyter, a
notebook interface
A notebook interface (also called a computational notebook) is a virtual notebook environment used for literate programming, a method of writing computer programs. Some notebooks are WYSIWYG environments including executable calculations embedded i ...
.
History
R is an open-source implementation of the
S programming language combined with
lexical scoping
In computer programming, the scope of a name binding (an association of a name to an entity, such as a variable) is the part of a program where the name binding is valid; that is, where the name can be used to refer to the entity. In other parts ...
semantics from
Scheme, which allow objects to be defined in predetermined blocks rather than the entirety of the code.
S was created by Rick Becker,
John Chambers, Doug Dunn, Jean McRae, and Judy Schilling at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...
around 1976. Designed for statistical analysis, the language is an
interpreted language
In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interprete ...
whose code could be directly run without a
compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs tha ...
. Many programs written for S run unaltered in R.
As a dialect of the
Lisp language, Scheme was created by
Gerald J. Sussman and
Guy L. Steele Jr.
Guy Lewis Steele Jr. (; born October 2, 1954) is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards.
Biography
Steele was born in Missouri ...
at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
around 1975.
In 1991, statisticians
Ross Ihaka and
Robert Gentleman at the
University of Auckland, New Zealand, embarked on an S implementation. It was named partly after the first names of the first two R authors and partly as a play on the name of S.
They began publicizing it on the data archive StatLib and the ''s-news'' mailing list in August 1993.
In 1995, statistician Martin Mächler convinced Ihaka and Gentleman to make R
free and open-source software under the
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...
.
The first official release came in June 1995.
The first official
"stable beta" version (v1.0) was released on 29 February 2000.
The
Comprehensive R Archive Network
R packages are extensions to the R statistical programming language. R packages contain code, data, and documentation in a standardised collection format that can be installed by users of R, typically via a centralised software repository such as ...
(CRAN) was officially announced on 23 April 1997. CRAN stores R's executable files, source code, documentations, as well as packages contributed by users. CRAN originally had 3 mirrors and 12 contributed packages. As of January 2022, it has 101 mirrors
and 18,728 contributed packages. In addition to hosting packages CRAN hosts binaries for major distributions of Linux, MacOS and Windows.
The R Core Team was formed in 1997 to further develop the language.
, it consists of Chambers, Gentleman, Ihaka, and Mächler, plus statisticians Douglas Bates,
Peter Dalgaard
Peter may refer to:
People
* List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name
* Peter (given name)
** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church
* Peter (surname), a su ...
,
Kurt Hornik, Michael Lawrence, Friedrich Leisch, Uwe Ligges,
Thomas Lumley, Sebastian Meyer, Paul Murrell, Martyn Plummer,
Brian Ripley, Deepayan Sarkar, Duncan Temple Lang,
Luke Tierney, and Simon Urbanek, as well as computer scientist Tomas Kalibera. Stefano Iacus, Guido Masarotto, Heiner Schwarte, Seth Falcon, Martin Morgan, and Duncan Murdoch were members.
In April 2003, the R Foundation was founded as a non-profit organization to provide further support for the R project.
Features
Data processing
R's
data structures include
vectors,
arrays
An array is a systematic arrangement of similar objects, usually in rows and columns.
Things called an array include:
{{TOC right
Music
* In twelve-tone and serial composition, the presentation of simultaneous twelve-tone sets such that the ...
,
lists, and data frames.
[
] Vectors are ordered collections of values and can be mapped to arrays of one or more dimensions in a
column major order. That is, given an ordered collection of dimensions, one fills in values along the first dimension first, then fill in one-dimensional arrays across the second dimension, and so on. R supports array arithmetics and in this regard is like languages such as
APL and
MATLAB.
The special case of an array with two dimensions is called a
matrix. Lists serve as collections of objects that do not necessarily have the same
data type. Data frames contain a list of vectors of the same length, plus a unique set of row names.
R has no
scalar data type. Instead, a scalar is represented as a length-one vector.
R and its libraries implement various statistical techniques, including
linear,
generalized linear and
nonlinear modeling, classical
statistical tests,
spatial and
time-series analysis, classification,
clustering, and others. For computationally intensive tasks,
C,
C++
C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...
, and
Fortran code can be
linked and called at run time. Another of R's strengths is static
graphics; it can produce publication-quality graphs that include mathematical symbols.
Programming
R is an
interpreted language
In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interprete ...
; users can access it through a
command-line interpreter
A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...
. If a user types
2+2
at the R command prompt and presses enter, the computer replies with
4
.
R supports
procedural programming
Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from imperative programming, based on the concept of the '' procedure call''. Procedures (a type of routine or subroutine) simply contain a series of computational steps to be carrie ...
with
functions and, for some functions,
object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...
with
generic functions. Due to its
S heritage, R has stronger
object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...
facilities than most statistical computing languages. Extending it is facilitated by its
lexical scoping
In computer programming, the scope of a name binding (an association of a name to an entity, such as a variable) is the part of a program where the name binding is valid; that is, where the name can be used to refer to the entity. In other parts ...
rules, which are derived from Scheme. R uses
S-expressions to represent both data and code. R's extensible object system includes objects for (among others):
regression models
Regression or regressions may refer to:
Science
* Marine regression, coastal advance due to falling sea level, the opposite of marine transgression
* Regression (medicine), a characteristic of diseases to express lighter symptoms or less extent ( ...
,
time-series
In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. Ex ...
and
geo-spatial coordinates. Advanced users can write C, C++,
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
,
.NET or
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
code to manipulate R objects directly.
Functions are
first-class objects and can be manipulated in the same way as data objects, facilitating
meta-programming that allows
multiple dispatch
Multiple dispatch or multimethods is a feature of some programming languages in which a function or method can be dynamically dispatched based on the run-time (dynamic) type or, in the more general case, some other attribute of more than one of ...
. Function arguments are passed by value, and are
lazy—that is to say, they are only evaluated when they are used, not when the function is called. A generic function acts differently depending on the
classes of the arguments passed to it. In other words, the generic function
dispatches the
method
Method ( grc, μέθοδος, methodos) literally means a pursuit of knowledge, investigation, mode of prosecuting such inquiry, or system. In recent centuries it more often means a prescribed process for completing a task. It may refer to:
*Scien ...
implementation specific to that object's
class. For example, R has a
generic print
function that can print almost every
class of
object in R with
print(objectname)
.
Many of R's standard functions are written in R, which makes it easy for users to follow the algorithmic choices made. R is highly extensible through the use of packages for specific functions and specific applications.
Packages
R's capabilities are extended through user-created ''packages'', which offer statistical techniques, graphical devices, import/export, reporting (
RMarkdown,
knitr
knitr is an engine for dynamic report generation with R. It is a package in the programming language R that enables integration of R code into LaTeX, LyX, HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc, and reStructuredText documents. The purpose of knitr is to allow ...
,
Sweave Sweave is a function in the statistical programming language R that enables integration of R code into LaTeX or LyX documents. The purpose is "to create dynamic reports, which can be updated automatically if data or analysis change".
The data an ...
), etc. These packages and their easy installation and use has been cited as driving the language's widespread adoption in
data science.
The packaging system is also used by researchers to organize research data, code and report files in a systematic way for sharing and archiving.
Multiple packages are included with the basic installation. Additional packages are available on CRAN,
Bioconductor, R-Forge,
Omegahat,
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...
, and other repositories.
The "Task Views" on the CRAN website
lists packages in fields including Finance, Genetics, High Performance Computing, Machine Learning, Medical Imaging,
Meta-Analysis
A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies. Meta-analyses can be performed when there are multiple scientific studies addressing the same question, with each individual study reporting me ...
,
Social Sciences and Spatial Statistics.
R has been identified by the
FDA as suitable for interpreting data from clinical research. Microsoft maintains a daily snapshot of CRAN that dates back to Sept. 17, 2014.
Other R package resources include R-Forge,
a platform for the collaborative development of R packages. The Bioconductor project provides packages for genomic data analysis, including object-oriented data-handling and analysis tools for data from
Affymetrix,
cDNA microarray, and next-generation
high-throughput sequencing
DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the order of nucleotides in DNA. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Th ...
methods.
A group of packages called the
Tidyverse
The tidyverse is a collection of open source packages for the R programming language introduced by Hadley Wickham and his team that "share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures" of tidy data. Characteristic features of t ...
, which can be considered a "dialect" of the R language, is increasingly popular among developers.
[Metacran]
listed 7 of the 8 core packages of the Tidyverse in the list of most download R packages. It strives to provide a cohesive collection of functions to deal with common data science tasks, including data import, cleaning, transformation and visualisation (notably with the
ggplot2
ggplot2 is an open-source data visualization package for the statistical programming language R. Created by Hadley Wickham in 2005, ggplot2 is an implementation of Leland Wilkinson's ''Grammar of Graphics''—a general scheme for data visu ...
package). Dynamic and interactive graphics are available through additional packages.
R is one of 5 languages with an
Apache Spark API, along with
Scala,
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
,
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
, and
SQL.
Milestones
A list of changes in R releases is maintained in various "news" files at CRAN.
[Changes in versions 3.0.0 onward:
Earlier change logs (by major release number):
*
*
*
*
*
] Some highlights are listed below for several major releases.
Interfaces
Various applications can be used to edit or run R code.
Early developers preferred to run R via the command line console,
succeeded by those who prefer an
IDE.
IDEs for R include (in alphabetical order
R.app(OSX/macOS only),
Rattle GUI,
R Commander,
RKWard,
RStudio, and Tinn-R.
R is also supported in multi-purpose IDEs such as
Eclipse via the StatET plugin, and
Visual Studio via the
R Tools for Visual Studio. Of these, RStudio is the most commonly used.
Statistical frameworks which use R in the background include
Jamovi and
JASP.
Editors that support R include
Emacs,
Vim (Nvim-R plugin),
Kate Kate name may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Kate (given name), a list of people and fictional characters with the given name or nickname
* Gyula Káté (born 1982), Hungarian amateur boxer
* Lauren Kate (born 1981), American autho ...
,
LyX,
Notepad++,
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor made by Microsoft with the Electron Framework, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code comple ...
,
WinEdt
WinEdt is a shareware Unicode (UTF-8) editor and shell for Microsoft Windows. It is primarily used for the creation of TeX (or LaTeX) documents, but can also be used to edit HTML or any other type of text file. It can be configured to run as a fr ...
, and Tinn-R.
Jupyter Notebook can also be configured to edit and run R code.
R functionality is accessible from scripting languages including
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
,
Perl
Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...
,
Ruby
A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...
,
F#, and
Julia
Julia is usually a feminine given name. It is a Latinate feminine form of the name Julio and Julius. (For further details on etymology, see the Wiktionary entry "Julius".) The given name ''Julia'' had been in use throughout Late Antiquity (e.g ...
. Interfaces to other, high-level programming languages, like
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
and
.NET C# are available.
Implementations
The main R implementation is written in R, C, and Fortran. Several other implementations aimed at improving speed or increasing extensibility. A closely related implementation is pqR (pretty quick R) by
Radford M. Neal with improved memory management and support for automatic multithreading.
Renjin and FastR are
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
implementations of R for use in a
Java Virtual Machine. CXXR, rho, and Riposte are implementations of R in
C++
C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...
.
Renjin,
Riposte, and pqR attempt to improve performance by using multiple cores and deferred evaluation. Most of these alternative implementations are experimental and incomplete, with relatively few users, compared to the main implementation maintained by the R Development Core Team.
TIBCO
TIBCO Software Inc. is an American business intelligence software company founded in 1997 in Palo Alto, California.
It has headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and offices in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South A ...
, who previous sold the commercial implementation
S-PLUS
S-PLUS is a commercial implementation of the S programming language sold by TIBCO Software Inc.
It features object-oriented programming capabilities and advanced analytical algorithms.
Due to the increasing popularity of the open source S succ ...
, built a
runtime engine called TERR, which is part of
Spotfire.
Microsoft R Open (MRO) is a fully compatible R distribution with modifications for multi-threaded computations. As of 30 June 2021, Microsoft started to phase out MRO in favor of the CRAN distribution.
Communities
R has local communities worldwide for users to network, share ideas, and learn.
A growing number of R events bring users together, such as conferences (e.g.
useR!, WhyR?, conectaR, SatRdays), meetups, as well as
R-Ladies groups that promote
gender diversity. The R Foundation taskforce focuses on women and other under-represented groups.
useR! conferences
The official annual gathering of R users is called "useR!".
The first such event was useR! 2004 in May 2004,
Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
, Austria. After skipping 2005, the useR! conference has been held annually, usually alternating between locations in Europe and North America. History:
* useR! 2006, Vienna, Austria
* useR! 2007, Ames, Iowa, US
* useR! 2008, Dortmund, Germany
* useR! 2009, Rennes, France
* useR! 2010, Gaithersburg, Maryland, US
* useR! 2011, Coventry, United Kingdom
* useR! 2012, Nashville, Tennessee, US
* useR! 2013, Albacete, Spain
* useR! 2014, Los Angeles, California, US
* useR! 2015, Aalborg, Denmark
* useR! 2016, Stanford, California, US
* useR! 2017, Brussels, Belgium
* useR! 2018, Brisbane, Australia
* useR! 2019, Toulouse, France
* useR! 2020, took place online due to COVID-19 pandemic
* useR! 2021, took place online due to COVID-19 pandemic
* useR! 2022, took place online due to COVID-19 pandemic
The dates and the location for the next useR! event is to be decided as of end of 2022.
''The R Journal''
''
The R Journal'' is an
open access,
refereed journal of the R project. It features short to medium length articles on the use and development of R, including packages, programming tips, CRAN news, and foundation news.
Comparison with alternatives
R is comparable to popular commercial statistical packages such as
SAS,
SPSS, and
Stata. One difference is that R is available at no charge under a
free software license
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) ...
.
In January 2009, the ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' ran an article charting the growth of R, the reasons for its popularity among data scientists and the threat it poses to commercial statistical packages such as SAS. In June 2017 data scientist Robert Muenchen published a more in-depth comparison between R and other software packages, "The Popularity of Data Science Software".
R is more procedural than either SAS or SPSS, both of which make heavy use of pre-programmed procedures (called "procs") that are built-in to the language environment and customized by parameters of each call. R generally processes data in-memory, which limits its usefulness in processing larger files.
Commercial support
Although R is an
open-source project, some companies provide commercial support and extensions.
In 2007, Richard Schultz, Martin Schultz, Steve Weston and Kirk Mettler founded
Revolution Analytics
Revolution Analytics (formerly REvolution Computing) is a statistical software company focused on developing open source and "open-core" versions of the free and open source software R for enterprise, academic and analytics customers. Revolution ...
to provide commercial support for Revolution R, their distribution of R, which includes components developed by the company. Major additional components include: ParallelR, the R Productivity Environment IDE, RevoScaleR (for
big data analysis), RevoDeployR, web services framework, and the ability for reading and writing data in the SAS file format.
[Morgan, Timothy Prickett (2011-02-07). "'Red Hat for stats' goes toe-to-toe with SAS". The Register, 7 February 2011. Retrieved from https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/07/revolution_r_sas_challenge/.] Revolution Analytics offers an R distribution designed to comply with established
IQ/OQ/PQ criteria that enables clients in the pharmaceutical sector to validate their installation of REvolution R. In 2015,
Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...
acquired Revolution Analytics
and integrated the R programming language into
SQL Server,
Power BI
Power BI is an interactive data visualization software product developed by Microsoft with a primary focus on business intelligence. It is part of the Microsoft Power Platform.
Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors t ...
,
Azure SQL Managed Instance,
Azure Cortana Intelligence
Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...
, Microsoft ML Server and
Visual Studio 2017.
In October 2011,
Oracle announced the ''Big Data Appliance'', which integrates R,
Apache Hadoop,
Oracle Linux
Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006. It is compiled from Red ...
, and a
NoSQL database with
Exadata hardware. ,
Oracle R Enterprise
Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a multi-model database, multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation.
It is a database commonly used ...
[Chris Kanaracus (2012)]
''Oracle Stakes Claim in R With Advanced Analytics Launch''
PC World, February 8, 2012. became one of two components of the "Oracle Advanced Analytics Option"
[Doug Henschen (2012)]
''Oracle Stakes Claim in R With Advanced Analytics Launch''
InformationWeek, April 4, 2012. (alongside
Oracle Data Mining).
IBM offers support for in-
Hadoop
Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage an ...
execution of R, and provides a programming model for massively parallel in-database analytics in R.
TIBCO
TIBCO Software Inc. is an American business intelligence software company founded in 1997 in Palo Alto, California.
It has headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and offices in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South A ...
offers a runtime-version R as a part of
Spotfire.
Mango Solutions offers a validation package for R, ValidR, to comply with drug approval agencies, such as the FDA. These agencies required the use of validated software, as attested by the vendor or sponsor.
Examples
Basic syntax
The following examples illustrate the basic
syntax of the language and use of the command-line interface. (An expanded list of standard language features can be found in the R manual, "An Introduction to R".)
In R, the generally preferred
assignment operator is an arrow made from two characters
<-
, although
=
can be used in some cases.
> x <- 1:6 # Create a numeric vector in the current environment
> y <- x^2 # Create vector based on the values in x.
> print(y) # Print the vector’s contents.
1 4 9 16 25 36
> z <- x + y # Create a new vector that is the sum of x and y
> z # Return the contents of z to the current environment.
2 6 12 20 30 42
> z_matrix <- matrix(z, nrow=3) # Create a new matrix that turns the vector z into a 3x2 matrix object
> z_matrix
1 2 , 2 20
, 6 30
, 12 42
> 2*t(z_matrix)-2 # Transpose the matrix, multiply every element by 2, subtract 2 from each element in the matrix, and return the results to the terminal.
1 2 3 , 2 10 22
, 38 58 82
> new_df <- data.frame(t(z_matrix), row.names=c('A','B')) # Create a new data.frame object that contains the data from a transposed z_matrix, with row names 'A' and 'B'
> names(new_df) <- c('X','Y','Z') # Set the column names of new_df as X, Y, and Z.
> print(new_df) # Print the current results.
X Y Z
A 2 6 12
B 20 30 42
> new_df$Z # Output the Z column
12 42
> new_df$Znew_df Z'&& new_df /h1>new_df$Z # The data.frame column Z can be accessed using $Z, Z' or syntax, and the values are the same.
TRUE
> attributes(new_df) # Print attributes information about the new_df object
$names
"X" "Y" "Z"
$row.names
"A" "B"
$class
"data.frame"
> attributes(new_df)$row.names <- c('one','two') # Access and then change the row.names attribute; can also be done using rownames()
> new_df
X Y Z
one 2 6 12
two 20 30 42
Structure of a function
One of R's strengths is the ease of creating new functions. Objects in the function body remain local to the function, and any data type may be returned.
Example:
# Declare function “f” with parameters “x”, “y“
# that returns a linear combination of x and y.
f <- function(x, y)
> f(1, 2)
11
> f(c(1,2,3), c(5,3,4))
23 18 25
> f(1:3, 4)
19 22 25
Modeling and plotting
The R language has built-in support for data modeling and graphics. The following example shows how R can easily generate and plot a linear model with residuals.
> x <- 1:6 # Create x and y values
> y <- x^2
> model <- lm(y ~ x) # Linear regression model y = A + B * x.
> summary(model) # Display an in-depth summary of the model.
Call:
lm(formula = y ~ x)
Residuals:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
3.3333 -0.6667 -2.6667 -2.6667 -0.6667 3.3333
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>, t, )
(Intercept) -9.3333 2.8441 -3.282 0.030453 *
x 7.0000 0.7303 9.585 0.000662 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 3.055 on 4 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.9583, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9478
F-statistic: 91.88 on 1 and 4 DF, p-value: 0.000662
> par(mfrow = c(2, 2)) # Create a 2 by 2 layout for figures.
> plot(model) # Output diagnostic plots of the model.
Mandelbrot set
Short R code calculating
Mandelbrot set
The Mandelbrot set () is the set of complex numbers c for which the function f_c(z)=z^2+c does not diverge to infinity when iterated from z=0, i.e., for which the sequence f_c(0), f_c(f_c(0)), etc., remains bounded in absolute value.
This ...
through the first 20 iterations of equation ''z'' = ''z''
2 + ''c'' plotted for different complex constants ''c''. This example demonstrates:
* use of community-developed external libraries (called packages), in this case caTools package
* handling of
complex numbers
In mathematics, a complex number is an element of a number system that extends the real numbers with a specific element denoted , called the imaginary unit and satisfying the equation i^= -1; every complex number can be expressed in the form ...
* multidimensional arrays of numbers used as basic data type, see variables
C
,
Z
and
X
.
install.packages("caTools") # install external package
library(caTools) # external package providing write.gif function
jet.colors <- colorRampPalette(c("green", "pink", "#007FFF", "cyan", "#7FFF7F",
"white", "#FF7F00", "red", "#7F0000"))
dx <- 1500 # define width
dy <- 1400 # define height
C <- complex(real = rep(seq(-2.2, 1.0, length.out = dx), each = dy),
imag = rep(seq(-1.2, 1.2, length.out = dy), dx))
C <- matrix(C, dy, dx) # reshape as square matrix of complex numbers
Z <- 0 # initialize Z to zero
X <- array(0, c(dy, dx, 20)) # initialize output 3D array
for (k in 1:20)
write.gif(X, "Mandelbrot.gif", col = jet.colors, delay = 100)
See also
*
R package
*
Comparison of numerical-analysis software
The following tables provide a comparison of numerical-analysis software.
Applications
General
Operating system support
The operating systems the software can run on natively (without emulation).
Language features
Colors indicate ...
*
Comparison of statistical packages
*
List of numerical-analysis software
*
List of statistical software
Statistical software are specialized computer programs for analysis in statistics and econometrics.
Open-source
* ADaMSoft – a generalized statistical software with data mining algorithms and methods for data management
* ADMB – a softwar ...
*
Rmetrics
Notes
References
External links
* of the R project
R Technical Papers
{{Portal bar, Computer programming
Array programming languages
Cross-platform free software
Data mining and machine learning software
Data-centric programming languages
Dynamically typed programming languages
Free plotting software
Free statistical software
Functional languages
GNU Project software
Literate programming
Numerical analysis software for Linux
Numerical analysis software for macOS
Numerical analysis software for Windows
Programming languages created in 1993
Science software
Statistical programming languages
Articles with example R code