R Programming: An Overview

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What is R?

R is a programming language that is used for graphics and statistical computing. It is highly extensible, and provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques. One of the reasons for R’s popularity is that it eases the production of well-designed publication-quality plots. Apart from the academia industry, many large companies like Uber, Google, Airbnb, and Facebook use R programming language. It is widely used by data miners and data scientists for analyzing the data. Not just data scientists, but R Programming Training is quite popular among statisticians as well.

Where is R used?

• Statistics
• Data Science
• Research Programmes
• Machine Learning

Most commonly used R packages

R packages are a group of R functions, complied code and sample data. They are installed by default during installation.

• dplyr: By constraining the options, it helps the users think about their data manipulation challenges. It is used for common data manipulation tasks.
• ggplot2: It is a system for creating graphics.
• table: This package reduces programming and compute time tremendously during data manipulation operations.
• Shiny: It eases the process of building interactive web apps straight from R.
• plyr: It is a set of tools for a common set of problems, like fitting the same model each patient subsets of a data frame.
• reshape2: This R package makes it easy to transform data between wide and long formats.

Top 5 industries using R

• Academia: R is a common choice for academic research, especially in the social sciences and biology. In 2017, R was the second-most visited tag from universities, Python being the first.
• Healthcare: R is used by biostatisticians for statistical methods necessary for clinical studies and bioinformatics.
• Government: R language is growing fast in the government sector as well. UK government is using R to modernize reporting of official statistics.
• Consulting: Consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain are always on the hunt for data engineers and data scientists who can design algorithms and build complex models. Hence, these companies tend to target applicants with knowledge of R programming language.
• Insurance: Lloyd’s, the world’s leading specialist insurance market, uses R and its advanced capabilities for data analysis to help manage its insurance risks.

How companies are using R?

• Airbnb: R package called Rbnb is used by Airbnb to drive numerous company initiatives, like predicting re-booking rates using past guest ratings, automating guest/host matching, internal reporting and data visualizations.
• Facebook: At Facebook, status and profile picture updates based behavior analysis is done using R.
• Twitter: Using R, Twitter has improved their customer experience.
• Google: Tech giant, Google, uses R for various purposes such as determining the effectiveness of display ads.
• Microsoft: Xbox uses R for visualization in their matchmaking system.

Is R for you?

If you want to get started to learn data science, learning statistical modeling and algorithm is more important than learning a programming language. R is a tool to compute and communicate your discovery. For a data scientist, learning R without a solid background in statistics is futile. However, R is a leading tool for machine learning, statistics, and data analysis, and learning R can push your career forward. If you want to become proficient in R, you can enroll at Multisoft Systems which is a well-known training organization providing R Programming Training in Noida for years.

About the author: Nisha Negi is a Technical Content Writer at Multisoft Systems. She writes blog posts and articles on various technical subjects. She is an experienced IT professional, and bears immense knowledge of the latest technology. She stays current with all the ongoing and upcoming certifications. Her way of expression is contemporary and crisp.