r Programming Language for Statistical Analysis

It is becoming important for today’s finance professionals to have the basic programming skills as more and more of their work involves building statistical and financial models. One such programming language is r which is fast becoming a programming language of choice for statistical analysis.

What is r?

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

It is an environment within which statistical techniques are implemented.

What can r be used for?

R can be used for a variety of data analysis problems. 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.

Broadly, it can be used for purposes such as:

• Data Manipulation

• Connecting to data sources

• Slicing and dicing data

• Modeling and Computation

• Statistical modeling

• Numerical simulation

• Data Visualization

• Visualizing fit for models

• Composing statistical graphics

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

 

 

What platforms can it run on?

It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS.

Download R

R can be downloaded from the following link: http://cran.r-project.org/

You will have three options to download: Linux, Windows and MacOS. Download and Install the one that is suitable for you.