Description

Each student will be expected to introduce a package (or two) that is relevant to their research interests in a 5 minute presentation during a class session. The objectives are:

• Learn how to find/download/install a new package and learn how to use it
• Teach your peers about existing R packages that may be useful in their research

The presentation must include:

1. Brief introduction: what does the package do and why is it useful? (1-2 slides, 1 minute)
2. Author introduction: a short background (affiliation and other packages, etc.) on at least one of the package authors (1 slide, 1 minute)
3. Simple demonstration of package code: example input/output from the examples or custom coded examples (2-3 slides, 3 minutes)

There will not be time to actually run any code on-the-fly during your presentation. Instead, copy the code and output into a presentation (powerpoint, etc.) so that you can simply display it. See an example presentation here.

To select a package, I recommend starting with the views on CRAN for a topic of interest. Then read the narrative in the task view for something interesting to you and install the package in R with install.package("packagename") in R and take a look at what it can do. Most package functions include sample code that performs a function. For example, if I was introducing the dplyr package, I might choose the filter() function. If you look in the help you will find a section called “Examples” that you can use for your example code in your presentation. All you have to do is copy-paste it from the help into the R console and them summarize what it’s doing in your presentation. For example, I might demonstrate (from the filter() documentation) that the following code will select all characters from Star Wars that are human.

library(dplyr)
filter(starwars, species == "Human")

## # A tibble: 35 x 13
##    name  height  mass hair_color skin_color eye_color birth_year gender
##    <chr>  <int> <dbl> <chr>      <chr>      <chr>          <dbl> <chr> 
##  1 Luke…    172    77 blond      fair       blue            19   male  
##  2 Dart…    202   136 none       white      yellow          41.9 male  
##  3 Leia…    150    49 brown      light      brown           19   female
##  4 Owen…    178   120 brown, gr… light      blue            52   male  
##  5 Beru…    165    75 brown      light      blue            47   female
##  6 Bigg…    183    84 black      light      brown           24   male  
##  7 Obi-…    182    77 auburn, w… fair       blue-gray       57   male  
##  8 Anak…    188    84 blond      fair       blue            41.9 male  
##  9 Wilh…    180    NA auburn, g… fair       blue            64   male  
## 10 Han …    180    80 brown      fair       brown           29   male  
## # ... with 25 more rows, and 5 more variables: homeworld <chr>,
## #   species <chr>, films <list>, vehicles <list>, starships <list>