This workshop is intended for SAS users who want to learn R. The people who will get the most out of this course are practicing researchers who have a decent working knowledge of SAS, and of basic statistical analysis (descriptive stats and regression models) as it applies to their field.
This is lesson 2 in a series. (I am currently working on Lesson 3 and may develop even more lessons in the future.) Lesson 1 covered the basics: importing data, cleaning and reshaping data, summary statistics, simple graphs and tables, and a few simple statistical models.
During this workshop, you will …
As in Lesson 1, we will work through a “data to doc” pipeline in R, comparing R code to SAS code each step of the way. We will use a different dataset this time.
We will …
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with
code)As in the previous lesson, we will start with raw data and work our way to a finished product. The first few steps of the pipeline will not be completely new to you if you did Lesson 1 … but it is good to get some extra practice!
Here we’ll load the R packages we are going to work with today. These are mostly the same as Lesson 1. This includes the tidyverse package for reading, manipulating, and plotting data, the lme4 package for fitting linear mixed models (this is a different package than in Lesson 1), and the easystats package which has some good model diagnostic plots.
Note about packages: Notice in Lesson 1 we used the nlme package to fit the linear mixed models but now we’re using lme4. This fits in with the idea that the best thing about R is “there are many ways to do something,” and the worst thing about R is also “there are many ways to do something.” I would say that nowadays the lme4 package is probably the most widely used package for fitting linear mixed models, so it’s important to be familiar with it if you are doing stats with R. The nlme package also has some useful capabilities so I would also recommend familiarizing yourself with it. Even more complex models can be fit with glmmTMB and other packages. Ultimately, you can fit multilevel models of any level of sophistication using Bayesian methods with packages like brms.
library(tidyverse)
library(lme4)
library(easystats)
library(lmerTest)
library(emmeans)
library(multcomp)
In this lesson, we’re going to use a dataset kindly provided by Andrea Onofri, a regular contributor to r-bloggers. This tutorial is loosely based on this blog post.