R Workshops - Bundle Deal

Biostatistics @ UHN is pleased to offer the Fall 2024 R Workshop Series.

R is a powerful, freely available programming language designed for statistical analysis and data visualization. Its flexibility and capability of supporting reproducible and transparent research has made it increasingly popular amongst health researchers.

Day 1: Thursday, October 10, 9:00am - 12:30pm
Day 2: Friday, October 11, 9:00am - 12:30pm

In this in-person interactive workshop, you will be guided through an introduction to R. Our workshop is designed to provide you with a practical understanding of R’s capabilities, focusing on its application in health-related research. Throughout the workshop, you will be guided through the foundational aspects of R and RStudio, learning to navigate the programming environment effectively using real-world examples. We will cover essential topics to help you get started with R, including:

• Overview of the RStudio environment and its features

• Basic R concepts, including objects, assignment, functions, vectors and data frames

• Importing data, basic data manipulation and exporting results

• Figure creation, including box plots, histograms, scatter plots, Kaplan-Meier curves

• Overview of simple statistical analyses, e.g. t-tests, chi-squared tests

• Introduction to "tidyverse" language
  By the end of the workshop, we aim to equip you with the foundation to enhance your research productivity and accuracy, empowering you to tackle data analysis and visualization tasks with confidence.

Friday, October 25, 9:00am - 12:30pm

In health research, data integrity is crucial for reproducible and high quality research, but raw data (e.g. electronic health records, clinical trial data, survey responses) often comes with inconsistencies, missing values, and formatting issues. This in-person, interactive workshop led by Biostatistics @ UHN biostatisticians is designed specifically to address these challenges, offering practical solutions to ensure your datasets are accurate and ready for analysis.

In this hands-on session, you will learn how to use R’s powerful data manipulation packages – such as "dplyr" and "janitor" – to clean and prepare health data for meaningful analysis. We will guide you through techniques for correcting errors, transforming variables, and merging datasets. You will also gain insights into best practices for maintaining data integrity throughout the cleaning process.

With this workshop, we aim to arm you with the skills to streamline your data preparation workflow, ensuring your analyses are based on reliable and well-structured data.

Monday, November 4, 9:00am - 12:30pm

The R package "ggplot2`" is widely considered the software’s leading tool creating compelling, informative and fully customizable graphics, enabling one to transform data into powerful visual stories. In this interactive workshop, you will learn how to leverage `ggplot2` to create versatile and elegant visualizations. We will introduce you to the "grammar" of "ggplot2", and guide you through the essentials of constructing various types of plots, including bar charts, histograms, scatter plots, density plots and boxplots. We will explore advanced techniques for customizing plots and enhancing visual appeal to highlight key patterns and trends, and also discuss best practices in visualization.

With this workshop, we aim to equip you with the skills to turn complex datasets into visual presentations that reveal patterns, support evidence-based conclusions and enhance your presentations and reports.

Monday, November 18, 9:00am - 12:30pm

In health research, the ability to produce clear, consistent and reproducible analyses and reports is essential for ensuring transparency and upholding the integrity of quality research. This workshop is designed to help you master this critical skill using R, focusing on generating comprehensive reports that seamlessly integrate data analysis and visualization.

During this workshop, you will learn how to use RStudio with Zotero to create reproducible reports that combine code, results and narrative (including citations of the literature) into a single, cohesive document. We will guide you through the process of document setup, writing dynamic code chunks, and incorporating visualization and tables into your reports. We will also explore how to customize report templates and export your results to various formats such as HTML, PDF and Word.

With this workshop, we aim to arm you with the tools for creating quality, well-organized and transparent reports to enhance the rigor and credibility of your research and analysis.

Participants will be expected to have some basic knowledge of statistics, but are not expected to be familiar with R. Participants must bring their own device onto which R Studio can be installed. R Studio installation instructions will be provided via e-mail prior to workshop.

Inquiries: [email protected]

Host or Publisher Biostats @ UHN | UHN Research