R is a programming language and free software environment for statistics.[6][7][8][9][10][11] R is a language built for a specific purpose. It is strictly designed for statistical analysis. The algorithms for many statistical models are devised in R. Precisely R is the language of Statistical Analyzers. It’s an open source and the best suite for the statisticians to develop statistical softwares.
Usage in other areas
The R language was originally made for statistics. But today, it is also used in many scientific fields including ecology.[12][13]
Development history
A list of changes in R releases is maintained in various "news" files at CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network).[14] Some highlights are listed below for several major releases.
Release
Date
Description
0.16
This is the last test version.
0.49
1997-04-23
This is the oldest source release which is currently available on CRAN.[15] CRAN is started on this date, with 3 mirrors that initially hosted 12 packages.[16]
0.60
1997-12-05
R becomes an official part of the GNU Project. The code is hosted and maintained on CVS.
0.65.1
1999-10-07
First versions of update.packages and install.packages functions for downloading and installing packages from CRAN.[17]
1.0
2000-02-29
The developers declared that it is stable enough for production use.[18]
1.4
2001-12-19
S4 methods are introduced and the first version for Mac OS X is made available soon after.
1.8
2003-10-08
Introduced a flexible condition handling mechanism for signalling and handling condition objects.
2.0
2004-10-04
Introduced fast loading of data with minimal expense of system memory.
2.1
2005-04-18
Support for UTF-8 encoding. They also started of internationalization and localization for different languages.
2.6.2
2008-02-08
Last version to support Windows 95, 98, Me and NT 4.0[19]
Just-in-time compilation (JIT) of functions and loops to byte-code enabled by default.
3.5.0
2018-04-23
Packages byte-compiled on installation by default. Compact internal representation of integer sequences. Added a new serialization format to support compact internal representations.
3.6.0
2019-04-26
4.0.0
2020-04-24
Communities
R has local communities worldwide for users to share ideas and learn.[21][22]
There are a growing number of R events bringing its users together, such as conferences (e.g. useR!, WhyR?, conectaR, SatRdays)[23][24] and other meetups.[25]
useR! conferences
The official annual gathering of R users is called "useR!".[26] The first such event was useR! 2004 in May 2004, Vienna, Austria.[27] After skipping 2005, the useR! conference has been held annually.[28] Subsequent conferences have included:[26]
In R, the generally preferred[30]assignment operator is an arrow made from two characters <-. Although = can be used instead.[31]
> x<-1:6# Create vector.> y<-x^2# Create vector by formula.> print(y)# Print the vector’s contents.[1] 1 4 9 16 25 36> mean(y)# Arithmetic mean of vector.[1] 15.16667> var(y)# Sample variance of vector.[1] 178.9667> model<-lm(y~x)# Linear regression model y = A + B * x.> print(model)# Print the model’s results.Call:lm(formula = y ~ x)Coefficients:(Intercept) x -9.333 7.000> summary(model)# Display an in-depth summary of the model.Call:lm(formula = y ~ x)Residuals: 1 2 3 4 5 6 3.3333 -0.6667 -2.6667 -2.6667 -0.6667 3.3333Coefficients: 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 ‘ ’ 1Residual standard error: 3.055 on 4 degrees of freedomMultiple R-squared: 0.9583, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9478F-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.
References
↑Hornik, Kurt (November 26, 2015). "R FAQ". The Comprehensive R Archive Network. 2.1 What is R?. Retrieved 2018-08-05.
↑ 2.02.1Ihaka, Ross (1998). R : Past and Future History(PDF). Interface '98 (Technical report). Statistics Department, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
R Development Core Team. "Writing R Extensions". Retrieved 2018-09-11. [...] we recommend the consistent use of the preferred assignment operator '<-' (rather than '=') for assignment.