Course Setup
I306
Statistics for Informatics
Spring 2026

Published

January 16, 2026

Create a Course Directory

Computers use filesystems to store, organize, and read data. The file browsers students most often use (Explorer on Windows, Finder on Mac) mix files on your computer’s local filesystem with files on cloud servers (OneDrive, iCloud). RStudio needs to work with files on your local filesystem. Reading and writing data on cloud storage can be slow and error-prone.

Choose a place on your laptop’s local filesystem (e.g., the C:/ drive on Windows, or your home folder on Mac) where you want to create the folder for this course. Download the course materials .zip file from Canvas and extract it to that location. This creates a folder containing most of the resources you’ll need for the class.

Install RStudio

Visit posit.co/downloads and follow the instructions to install RStudio Desktop. It’s free.

If you get stuck:

Install Some R Packages

Open RStudio. The part at the bottom is called the console it’s where the R interpreter is running. You can type in code into the interpreter and it will run it.

As you work in R you’ll work with a number of packages. Packages in R are similar to modules in Python. They have useful functions and data that you can import and use in your projects. In this class, I’m trying not to ask you to use too many packages. One we wil use the tidyverse package. The tidyverse is really more of a “meta-package” that installs many different packages that are all designed to work together. The tidyverse has been very important to R’s rise in popularity.

To install tidyverse run the following code in the R interpreter running in your RStudio:

install.packages('tidyverse')

We’re also going to use a package called AppliedStatsInteractive that is designed to accompany the material in this textbook. The installation is a little more involved.

First you need the devtools package:

install.packages('devtools')

The devtools lets you install packages from github repositories. Without it R can only install packages from the CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) repository, and some developers don’t bother going through the process of publishing their packages on CRAN.

With devtools installed, now we can install AppliedStatsInteractive with the following commands:

remotes::install_github("haleyjeppson/ggmosaic")
remotes::install_github("agmath/AppliedStatsInteractive")
remotes::install_github("rundel/learnrhash")

Finally, test that you have setup AppliedStatsInteractive successfully:

learnr::run_tutorial("00_StartHere", package = "AppliedStatsInteractive")