UK research institution supplied with R training for new team

A large UK based research institution, which collaborates and works in many locations around the world, requested an R training course to help a newly created research team.

Unlike other programming languages, R is not general-purpose. Instead it is a specialised language written for statistical computing and data visualisation and it is utilised by the researchers and data analysts in the institution for most of the projects because it does not require external libraries for data analysis as the statistical functionalities are built into the core. R is an important tool for researchers because it allows for reproducibility and machine learning into the researcher’s analysis by creating scripts that imports and prepares graphs for example, which will save time and enable greater productivity and insight in the results. R is also a brilliant tool to produce visualisation of data, even with only fundamental knowledge of the language the researcher can create different graphs such as scatter and line plots or histograms but with more experience advanced packages like ggplot2 will allow the researcher to create interesting and extremely informative graphs. These high quality data visualisations enables better insight into the data and therefore inform better decision making to improve lives throughout the world. Furthermore, R is an open-source language with a very strong community, which means that people are always producing new and enhanced frameworks that can be instantly utilised and adapted to improve functionality of the researcher’s analysis.

The research institution communicated to JBI and the instructor that they wanted a 3 day training course and they required the training to be tailored towards their research practices. JBI and the instructor coordinated several exercises and labs that incorporated data and scenarios from the institution themselves, whilst providing demonstrations that used examples from similar research organisations. The course was developed to ensure that these objectives were met:

• Introduction to data management in R, R studio and exploring the tidyverse basics
• Using data analysis tools to perform analysis and then exploring the range of data visualisation to create effective graphs and geographic data
• Gain an understanding of business intelligence and web scraping

The training course took place remotely in the offices of the research institution and the delegates who took part were complimentary on their feedback forms of the course content and instructor:

“It was one of the courses where the instructor has a huge impact on the material and how it is absorbed. The instructor made the course very entertaining and great to follow along. At the same time she listen carefully to what is most useful to us and adapted the syllabus accordingly. I learned a lot and had great fun.” HG, Research analyst

For further information on R training courses, please see below:

R training course 

R with shiny training course

R for life science researcher training course

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