top of page
  • Writer's pictureHURU School

What is R?

Updated: Jan 18, 2023

R is an open-source programming language created explicitly for statistical computing and graphics. Ross and Robert Gentleman started R in 1993, and it is widely used for data analysis and statistical modeling.

It is particularly well-suited for working with data, with a wide range of packages that support data import, cleaning, manipulation and visualization. R also has a strong community, contributing to developing a wide range of packages, tutorials, and other resources.


R has an extensive library of packages that provide a wide range of statistical and graphical capabilities. R is also widely used in academia and research, as well as in industry, for data analysis, data visualization, and statistical modeling.


R Studio is built on top of the R programming language that provides various reproducible research tools. The multiple tools, such as R Markdown, allow users to create documents that integrate text, code, and outputs. It also has Shiny, which enables users to create interactive web applications using R. It has built-in support for version control systems like Git that track changes to your code and collaborate with others.


With the increasing amount of data in various fields, R became a powerful tool for data science and machine learning, particularly in making beautiful graphs and visualizations.


R packages include:

  • Dplyr: It is a data manipulation library for R.

  • Tidyr is a great package that will help you clean and tidy your data.

  • Ggplot2: the perfect library for visualizing data.

  • Shiny: It is the ideal tool for creating interactive web apps directly from R.

  • Caret: one of the most important libraries for machine learning in R.


This article was written by Mercy Chebet of the HURU School Data Science Class



27 views0 comments

Related Posts

See All
bottom of page