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PolyU Library

Online Tools for Assignment

Introduce useful online tools that may help to prepare your assignment.

R

R is an open-source programming language for statistical analysis and data visualization. Although there are other statistical analysis software like SPSS, SAS, and Stata available in the market, there are several benefits to use R:

  • Open source
  • Mature packages or libraries
  • Easy to read, learn and use
  • Well supported with established user communities

One of the advantages of using R is that you can directly apply a vast array of pre-existing packages or libraries which are written by other users. You can find more R libraries on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and available cheatsheets on RStudio. Here are some popular R libraries:

Data Collection

  • rvest
    rvest is a library for scraping or harvesting data from web pages.

Data Cleaning/Manipulation

  • tidyr
    tidyr is a library for converting the data into tidy format.
  • dplyr
    dplyr is a library for data manipulation.

Data Analysis

  • caret
    caret is a library for training and plotting classification and regression models.
  • tidymodels
    tidymodels is a collection of packages for modeling and machine learning based on tidyverse.

Data Visualization

  • ggplot2
    ggplot2 is a popular library for data visualization

RStudio

RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. You must install R before you can use RStudio. You can download and install R and RStudio for Windows and Mac OS from the links below:

Creative Commons License

Except where otherwise noted, the content of this guide is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.