R

What is R?

R is the best tool for scientific and technical analyses. It is a language which was developed for statistics, data processing and graphics. R make you more productive than spreadsheets can, allowing you to get much more work done in less time. R also makes your work reproducible, giving a permanent record of what was done, which is important in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of your work. Because R is Free Open Source Software, its source code can be seen and checked, which gives peace of mind when you depend on the results.

R courses

With more than 15 years of experience, we can provide personalised R training on any subject

What can I do with R?

Statistics

R was developed by statisticians and is the best language for all statistical analyses. Although other programs can do some statistics, none have the number of packages of functions that R does. Furthermore, none can combine statistical analyses with R's other strengths.

Data processing

Doing analyses is only part of the work. Real-world analyses require importing, cleaning, and combining data sets before any calculations are done. Fortunately, R excels in all these tasks.

GIS

Doing spatial calculations with a GUI-based program is slow, and prone to error. R lets you automate calculations and allows you to combine spatial data, with other data types. Because R is FOSS, it integrates with FOSS GIS programs such as QGIS, SAGA and Whitebox, allowing you to automate their analyses.

This graph was created using an R script which calculated the mean daily precipitation over a basin, by downloading daily rainfalls from MSC stations, cleaning the data, gridding the values, clipping the grid to the extent of the basin, and calculating the mean basin value, for each day. The values were plotted with hourly streamflows, which were processed to determine the time to peak, which is plotted. Using the script, graphs were easily created for all events in 22 basins over 10 years.

Visualisation

R is the best scientific graphing program bar none. Using R, you can create any type of graph, you can do it faster and better than in a spreadsheet, and you can automate the graphs you create frequently.

Documents and reports

R can also create documents. You can use it to create any type of document from a scientific paper to a book. This paper was written entirely in R! The document was output as a .docx file to allow the authors to edit it, and was also output to LaTeX and .pdf files for submission to the journal. You can create presentations in R, which can be output as Powerpoint or .pdf formats.

Uniquely, you can also embed calculations in documents, so reports can be "live". When the input data changes, the numbers, tables, graphs and maps in the report are updated. Your reports will always be up to date with the correct values.

Websites

R's strengths in data processing, analyses, statistics, graphing and GIS can provide the back-end processing for websites. You can easily create graphic interfaces which let users run your sophisticated code and produce custom reports.

R packages

We have extensive experience in developing R packages. You can create custom packages of your R functions, and commonly-used datasets. Packaging your code speeds development and reduces wasted time. It also allows you to ensure quality control of your analyses and reduces training time for new employees.