Introduction to quantitative analysis with R

Author

Sophie Lee

Published

July 24, 2024

Welcome!

Welcome to the Introduction to Quantitative Analysis with R course, designed for and with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUCH). This course aims to introduce R and RStudio software. R is an open-source software that was designed to make data analysis more accessible, reproducible, and user friendly.

This two-day course will equip you with the essential skills to leverage the power of R for your data analysis. We will begin with a gentle introduction to the RStudio interface and the basics of the R coding language (or syntax). We will then see how R can be used to efficiently load, clean and transform data. Finally, we will use R to produce clear, compelling visualisations and tables to communicate findings.

Throughout the course, we will discuss best practices for reproducible data analysis, ensuring that all code adheres to the Analysis Standards as recommended by the Aqua book.

Style tip

Throughout the notes, you will see boxes with ‘style tips’. These are to ensure that your code follows the Tidyverse style guide, and ensuring your code adhered to Analysis Standards.

Data for the course

This course uses data from the English Housing Survey (EHS) from 2021 and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) 2024 economic and fiscal outlook. All data used in the course can be downloaded from the course repository.

Before beginning the course, please save these files into a folder called ‘data’ within the folder you will be working from during the course.