Week 7: R basics

Objectives

This tutorial will teach you background knowledge on R. You’ll learn about:

objects
R’s basic data types
R’s basic data structures including vectors and lists
functions and their arguments

Downloads

First things first! Download these files into your working directory:

Setting up

Open up Rstudio. Start a new notebook file by selecting “File” -> “New File” -> “R Notebook” Save the file as “yourname_week5.Rmd”. Delete the instructions starting from “This is an [R…”. For the different code below, insert it as R chunks. An R chunk is code placed after a line that starts with ` { r } `and ends before a line with ` `.
For this tutorial, you will be copying the code chunks below into your R notebook as R chunks.

Defintions

Variable: Holds a value
Function: Takes in input, does some magic/task, returns output
Command: Code snippet you want to evaluate
Environment: Your workspace, where your variables, functions and packages are stored
Object: variable, function, data etc. What fills up your environment
Commands/functions in R are called like so:

print("Hello World")

Copy the above code into your console and press enter. Next, copy it as an R chunk into your notebook. Press play.

The print function is given an argument (also known as input) within the ‘()’ . All functions are called this way.

load("R_basics.Rdata")
sum(x)
plot(x,y)
require(limma)
source("helper.R")

The output is returned once the function or command is evaluated - i.e. when you run it or enter into the command console

Try it!

Simple arithmetic

R is really a calculator
Basic arithmetic operators do what you think they would: +, -, *, /
Some special operators: %% (modulus), %*% (matrix multiplication)
Some special variables: pi, TRUE, FALSE, NULL, NA, NaN, Inf
Some fancier operators: log(), exp(), sqrt(), round()

Some logical operators: |, &, <, >

1 + 2
2/4
(4+5^7)/56
3 %% 5 
log10(100)

Spaces do not matter
Order of operations matters
more here: https://www.statmethods.net/management/operators.html

Variables

Variables are letters or words
Store a value
Could be a number, character, string, array (or vector), matrix, etc.
Assign a value to a variable either via the assignment operator <- or the equals sign =

x <- 1
y = 2 
very_important_variable <- 0
not_very_important = 100 

Can change existing variables, add, send them into commands/functions

data <- 0 
data <- 3 
data <- x + y 
data <- sqrt(x)
data <- rnorm(1000)
more_data <- 1000
data <- data + more_data 

Data types and structures

Numbers (integers, doubles):
```
1
1.32545
5e9
```
Characters:
```
'A'
'z'
```
Strings:
```
"Yaaaas"
"Booo"
"Whatever"
```

Array or vector: made of multiple elements of the same data class

c(1,3,5)
c('A', 'B', 'C')
c("Hello", "Goodbye")
1:100
rnorm(100)
rep(1,10)
seq(0,200,10)

Can assign them to variables
```
my_seq <- seq(0,200,10)
```
Access elements by an index
```
my_seq[1] 
```
and replace or change single or multiple elements
```
my_seq[1] <- 1000 
my_seq[3:6] <- c(30,20,40,36) 
```
NOTE: in R, we count from 1 (not 0)

Matrix or tables:

diag(10)
matrix(1:10, ncol=5, nrow=2)
cbind(1:10, 10:1)
rbind(1:10, 10:1)

Can also access elements via indices, but this time we select the row, then column:
```
A <- diag(5)
A[1,5] <- 9
A
```
Negative indexing returns all but the indices specified, useful for data splicing.
```
my_seq <- seq(0,200,10)
my_seq[-10]
my_seq[-10:-20]
```
Lists are collections of data, and elements in a list can be of varying lengths and data classes/types.
```
B <- 1:10
C <- "sex"
D <- list(A,B,C)
```
Access different levels with double square brackets
```
D[[1]]
```
or, if we have tags/labels/names on the elements within the list, via the tag operator $
```
names(D) <- c("A", "B", "C")
D$A
D[["A"]]
```
We can have an almost infinite number of nested lists (but this is dangerous/mad/confusing/useful)
We can add elements to a list by assigning a position/index to a value.
```
D[[4]] <- D 
D[[4]][[4]] <- D 
D[[4]][[4]][[3]]
```
Can delete a component by assigning NULL to it.
```
D[[1]] <- NULL
```

We can append two lists

my_list = list("a", "b", "c")
your_list = list("x", "y","z")
append(my_list, your_list)

But, lists themselves need to be specified/initialised beforehand
```
E <- list()
```

Advanced data types and structures

Factors: define your own data class and has levels or strict values that this new data class can take.

sex <-  c("male", "female", "male", "male", "female")  
sex <- factor( sex, levels=c("male", "female"))
sex

If you try to assign a new value to a variable, it has be one of the known levels, otherwise goes to NA.

sex[1] <- "female"
sex[2] <- "unknown" # This will cause an error!
sex # You should see the NA value 

Data frames also combine multiple data types, but as a table (or matrix)
```
data.frame( x=1:10, y = rep("hello", 10) ) 
```
They also work in a similar way to the matrix class, but have stricter rules for row.names, and are much easier to mess up.
Updated versions of data.frame include tibbles, but this belongs to the “tidyverse”. We will come back to this later.

Advanced R types

As R is an object-oriented (OO) language, there are also some OO systems (which we will not go through here). The most commonly used in bioinformatics related packages is the S4 class. For some advanced reading: http://adv-r.had.co.nz/S4.html.

Functions

Functions take in inputs or arguments
User defined or from other packages
Every function has its own set of inputs
They have to be entered into the function in the correct order, or labelled
You can find out the necessary input from the man page of a function
```
?order
```
Or by typing in the name of the function into the console
```
order
```

Some useful functions:

length(my_list) # returns the length of an object 
sort(my_seq)   # sorts a list, vector or matrix  
ls()     # lists all the objects in your environment 

More here: https://www.statmethods.net/management/functions.html

User-defined functions

The structure of a function:

my_function <- function(arg1, arg2, ... ){
commands (or statements)
return(object)
}

objects in the function are local, so changing them within the function does not have a global effect (mostly, but beware!)
objects returned can be any data type
can look inside other functions to see how they work:
```
dist
```
you can write your function for tasks that are usually repetitive or have some ‘abstract’ function ``` my_plot <- function(data){ plot(data, pch=19, col=”blue”, cex=2) }

my_plot(my_seq) ```

Test yourself!

Install these packages (and their dependencies):
- From CRAN: tidyverse, devtools
- From bioconductor: EGAD
- From github: CatterPlots
In your console, generate a vector of random numbers (any which way you want) of length between 10 and 100, and assign it to a variable called “my_random_numbers”. Print out the length of this vector, and then the first and last numbers of the vector. Copy the code into your R notebook as an R chunk.
Generate two square matrices (equal width and height) named B1 and B2. Multiply these matrices and save the output of the multiplication as B. Print out the first column of B1, the last row of B2, and then the diagonal of B. Copy the code into your R notebook as an R chunk.
Plot any of the plots from the CatterPlot page. Copy the code into your R notebook as an R chunk.
Make a matrix of dimension 20 by 40, full of zeroes. Then, modify the matrix so that once viewed, it spells out your initials OR a random shape OR pixel art. Use the image() function to view it as you go along, but remember, it plots things rotated… Once done, plot it using the image function, but remove the axes. Copy the code into your R notebook as an R chunk.
“Knit” your R markdown file into a pdf or html.

Solutions

Resources and cheatsheets

https://posit.cloud/learn/cheat-sheets https://posit.cloud/learn/primers/1.2

Back to the homepage