Videos on Data Analysis with R: Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced Resources

If you want to learn about R through videos, there are now a large number of options. This post provides links to many of these video under the headings of: (a) What is R? (b) Introductory R, and (c) Intermediate and Advanced R.

What is R?

If you are evaluating whether you should learn and use R, these videos explain what R does and why it is worth learning.

• David Smith from REvolutions provides an Introduction to R.
• Dice News presents a two minute quick overview of R
• Courtney Brown presents a 7 minute video on why he encourages his students to learn R.
• J.D. Long presents an hour long video conference on how he came to use R.

Introductory R

If you have just started learning R, these videos show you how to do basic data analytic tasks in R.

• Rvideos provides around 20 videos providing an introduction to R on topics such as bootstrapping, ANOVA, Graphs, Dates, Sampling, Help, and more.
• ramstatdavid has around 25 videos on YouTube each of around 5 minutes. Many of the videos are on producing plots in R.
• LearnViaWeb has around 15 introductory R videos. Topics include loops, time series, installing R, reading and writing data, writing a function, GLM, and using random numbers.
• Decision Science News has two ten minute video tutorials providing an introduction to R.
• wildscop on YouTube has eight introductory tutorials on R. Topics include installing R, using help, opening files, interacting with the console, manipulating matrices, and plotting.
• ahmetrics on YouTube has five tutorials on R on topics such as trellis plots, reading Excel data, simple linear regression
• Learning R Toolkit has a six module course on R with videos. The first two modules are free.
• regionomics on YouTube has around 5 videos on R interspersed with videos on other topics. Topics include an introduction to R, Rcmdr, and Discrete Choice models.
• Dr. Thomas MacFarland has a series of introductory lectures on R using the Tegrity viewer. It assumes very little prior knowledge of computing or statistics. When I tried it, Tegrity worked better in Firefox than in Chrome.
• off2themovies2 on YouTube has around 20 introductory tutorials on R
• mattstat on YouTube has 7 introductory tutorials on R
• MrIanfellows on YouTube has 3 videos providing examples of using the Deducer GUI to interact with R.

I thank Rob Hyndman for helping me discover a few of the above.

Intermediate and Advanced Materials on R

If you know the basics of R and are interested in learning about a particular topic related to R, the following videos are great. I find it useful to hear how experts talk about R in order to get a sense of how to speak and think about R.

• Drew Conway makes available a set of videos through VCASMO. The talks are drawn from a range of presenters. The list is growing and at the time of posting includes talks on: ggplot2, Social Network Analysis in R, SQL and R, Python and R, optimisation and R, Zelig, and more.
• Hadley Wichkam has a four part video short course on graphics with R. It is particularly good if you want to learn ggplot2
• David Mease provides a complete video course on Data Mining using R and Excel
• McStatsTutorials on YouTube has 6 videos on Time Series. A couple of videos demonstrate how to perform analyses using R.
• For my own videos, see the Video Tag of my blog. For example, a 34 minute video analysing Winter Olympic Medal data using StatET and R..

Related Resources

If you enjoy learning about data analysis through videos, you may also want to have a look at my earlier post on full-length mathematics and statistics video courses. These are great if you need to consolidate more fundamental mathematical and statistical concepts. I also have a post with links on Getting Started with R.
If there are links to videos on R that I have left off the list, feel free to post a link in the comments.