Welcome 👋
This four-day course offers a comprehensive journey in R, from beginner to advanced levels, with a focus on practical data analysis, visualisation, and real-world applications in health data science.
Whatever your background or experience with R — whether you’re a total beginner or have some prior experience — we hope you find this course useful, enjoyable, and the beginning of a rewarding journey using R.
Course overview
The course is divided into four sessions, starting with the fundamentals of R, including data types, subsetting, control flow, and an introduction to the R language and the RStudio environment. Subsequent sessions will focus on essential skills for health data science, such as data manipulation and visualisation, along with techniques to make your code more efficient, like writing functions.
Later sessions delve into advanced topics, including iteration, vectorisation, and efficient modelling with purrr and broom, all applied to health data science. Practical exercises and a mini-project provide hands-on experience with health-related datasets, culminating in dynamic reporting using Quarto.
🐣 Session 1 (“Beginner”)
3rd November, 2025
- Welcome and introduction to R
- Data types and objects
- Importing and exporting data
- Subsetting
- What’s a function?
🐥 Session 2 (“Intermediate”)
10th November, 2025
- Iteration and control flow
- Data manipulation with the tidyverse
- Select columns or rows (e.g.,
select,filter) - Sort (
arrange) - Create/modify columns (
mutate) - Combine datasets (e.g.,
bind_rows,left_join)
- Select columns or rows (e.g.,
🐤 Session 3 (“Intermediate”)
17th November, 2025
- Further data manipulation tasks
- Reshape a dataset (
pivot_longer,pivot_wider) - Group and summarise (
group_by,summarise)
- Reshape a dataset (
- Plotting with ggplot2
- Mini project
Each session will run from 13:00 to 17:00 (UK time). The sessions will include live lectures and practical exercises, with opportunities to ask questions throughout. All sessions will be recorded.