[R] R for simple stats

[Tim Wilson]

Hi everyone,

I'm taking a course in statistics as part of my doctoral program in
education at the U. of Minnesota, USA. I found R via Rpy, a python
module that makes it possible to use R from python scripts.

The instructor refers to SPSS a lot and that seems to be the standard
stats tool around here. But being more of a Unix guy and not intimidated
by programming, I'd like to see if I can do some of my course homework
with R (probably using Rpy frequently).

One thing I've noticed about SPSS is that it makes it extremely easy to
generate all sorts of summary statistics including means, various
trimmed means, skewness, etc. I've not had much luck doing similar
things with R yet. For example, I have yet to find out how to calculate
the skewness of a set of data. (This is a vector in R, right?) The same
is true of trimmed means.

I guess what I'm looking for is a reference that would point me to a
particular R library or function for a particular statistic that I'd
like to calculate. For example, I look up skewness and it tells me to
use the foo function. Does such a think exist?

I'm very impressed with what I see so far and it's likely that my
inexperience with R at this point is making things look harder than they
really are. But my approach has always been to jump in with both feet
and give it a go. I haven't drowned yet.

-Tim

-- 
Tim Wilson      |   Visit Sibley online:   | Check out:
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W. St. Paul, MN |                          | http://slashdot.org
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