Getting started with R

Abstract

History and scope of R/CRAN The development of R (R Development Core Team, 2010) as an independent public-domain statistical computing environment was started in the early 1990s by two statisticians at the University of Auckland, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. They decided to mimic the S system developed at AT&T during the 1980s by John Chambers and colleagues. By the late 1990s, R development was expanded to a larger core group, and the Comprehensive R Archive Network ( CRAN ) was created for specialized packages. The group established itself as a non-profit R Foundation based in Vienna, Austria, and began releasing the code biannually as a GNU General Public License software product (Ihaka & Gentleman 1996). R grew dramatically, both in content and in widespread usage, during the 2000s. CRAN increased exponentially with ∼100 packages in 2001, ∼600 in 2005, ∼2500 in 2010, and ∼3 , 300 by early 2012. The user population is uncertain but was estimated to be ∼2 million people in 2010. R consists of a collection of software for infrastructure analysis, and about 25 important packages providing a variety of important data analysis, applied mathematics, statistics, graphics and utilities packages. The CRAN add-on packages are mostly supplied by users, sometimes individual experts and sometimes significant user communities in biology, chemistry, economics, geology and other fields. Tables B.1 and B.2 give a sense of the breadth of methodology in R as well as CRAN packages (up to mid-2010).