How To Install R Software for Data Analysis and Computing

Saturday, January 12, 2013

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.

R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formula where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.

Now, we're going to install R into your machine. The first thing to do is visit R website and choose the suitable version (Unix, Mac or Windows). After that, just follow the instruction. In this case, I'm using Windows version.