R[101]

What is the buzz about ‘R’?
What is R?
How can I use it?
Where do I use it?
How do I start?

I had all the same questions about it, the first time I heard of it. That’s why I want to explain in some blog posts what the possibilities are in R and what you can use it for.

But first, What is R?
R is a programming language, just like you have C, Java, VB, … But the main difference is that R is invented to do statistical computing. It’s nothing new at all, it has been used by statisticians and data miners for over 20 years for developing software and data analysis.
Another interesting thing about it. It is maintained by the Free Software Foundation, with other words is free of charge and the source code is available for everyone. This makes it even more interesting. Since it has been used for more then 20 years and it’s source code is open for everyone, you can imagine a lot of plugins have been developed for it. This makes the number of possibilities it has now humongous

How can I use it?
You can use R to do statistical calculation on data you have available.
Like correlations, chance, decision trees, …
Since numbers are not always easy to understand, there are a lot of plugins that can be loaded to chart this data. (see examples)

Where do I use it?
Big Data or Small Data, it doesn’t matter. You can use it on almost all the data you have. Keeping in mind that you know what you are doing off course. You need to understand some basic statistics to start with, so you can try out some things.

What is the purpose?
Find interesting facts about your data.
When do people buy a 2nd car? Or is there a relation between the weather and selling ice-cream?

What tools do I use?
You can start with RStudio it’s a free of charge tool that includes everything you need. But I can’t hold myself of advertising Microsoft off course since I am a Microsoft BI Consultant. Microsoft implemented R since SQL 2016 in SQL Server & Power BI. And that is just awesome! Because of that the possibilities of SQL & PowerBI increased by a huge number.

How do I start?
In my next blog post I will start with explaining the basics of R.
What data types do you have,? How do you keep data together?
I’ll keep on writing some posts about R and each time I’ll explain something more.

I hope you R ready for it!