Introduction to R - Part 2

Installing packages

There are 2 ways to install a new package, you can either use the menu (Tools > Install Packages) or you can use the install.packages() function. Luckily the pckage we need is already installed so we can skip this step.

Loading packages

Once you’ve installed a package you need to load it into the R workspace. You can do this by using the library() or require() functions.
In order to import the SPSS data file we have we need a package called foreign. You can load it by running either of the following commands:

# Either
library(foreign)

# Or
require(foreign)

This will make all of the functions from the package available to you, in this case we’re interested in the read.spss() function to load the SPSS data into R.

dat2<-read.spss("SPSS_Data1.sav")
str(dat2)

Exploring data frames

You’ll see that the last command showed that the SPSS data we just imported is stored in a list variable. This is fine for some data but we want this variable to be in a data frame.
You can convert it using the data.frame() function:

dat2<-data.frame(dat2)
str(dat2) # Check to make sure the structure type has changed

Once it’s converted you can start looking at the data. Let’s start by checking that it looks reasonable.
Use head() and tail() to look at the first or last few rows of data, and names() to look at the names of the columns in the dataset. You can also use View() to open up the full dataset in the script pane.

head(dat2)    # Look at the first few rows
tail(dat2)    # Look at the last few rows
names(dat2)   # Check the column names
View(dat2)    # Open dataset in script pane

That looks good, although the column names could be a bit more informative. Let’s rename the HEIGHT column to HeightCM so we know the units of measurement.
You can do this by assigning the new value to the 2nd position of names(dat2), like so:

names(dat2)[2] <- "HeightCM"
names(dat2)

Actually, all of the column names could be improved, lets rename them all:

names(dat2)[1:4]<-c("AgeYrs","HeightCM","ShoeSizeUK","HairColour")
names(dat2)

Going deeper with data frames

Let’s dive a little deeper into exploring data frames.
Start by making sure that the TMS_Data.txt file is loaded into the workspace. Just in case you don’t remember, the code for that is:

dat1 <- read.delim("TMS_data.txt")

Let’s do some of the same checks we did on the last dataset:

str(dat1)     # Show the structure of the variable, is it a dataframe?
names(dat1)   # Show the names of the columns, are they understandable?
head(dat1)    # Show the first few lines of data, do they look sensible?
dim(dat1)     # Show the dimensions of the data (Rows, Columns)

You can also explore specific variables in the data but to do this we need to revisit indexing.

temp <- c (1, 3, 5, 6, 17, 8)
temp[5]

[1] 17

dat1[2,6]     # Shows the element in Row 2, Column 3
dat1[456,9]   # Shows the element in Row 465, Column 9

# You can select multiple sequential elements using the colon symbol:
dat1[1:5,9]   # Shows rows 1 to 5 in column 9
dat1[5,1:3]   # Shows columns 1 to 3 in row 5
dat1[1:3,3:5] # SHows columns 3 to 5 in rows 1 to 3

# You can also leave one of the numbers out and R will show the all rows or columns:
dat1[50,]     # Shows all columns in Row 50
dat1[,6]      # Shows all rows in column 6
dat1[1:5,]    # Shows all columns for rows 1 to 5 

# Either using square brackets:
dat1[45,"RT"] # Show Row 45 in the column called RT
dat1[,"Axes"] # Show all rows in the column called "Axes"

# Or by using the $ symbol:
dat1$Hemisphere # Show all the rows in the column called "Hemisphere"

# You can even combine the two ways:
dat1$Congruence[57] # Show row number 57 in the column called "Congruence"

Mean

The mean can be calculated using the mean() function. If you’re using it on a data frame be sure to select the column you’d like to like to run the function on:

mean(dat1)      # This will produce an error
mean(dat1$RT)   # This will calculate the mean RT

Some data will have missing entries (usually indicated by NA), and this can confuse some functions:

mean(dat1$Twitches)

## [1] NA

In order to deal with this mean() has an optional input called na.rm, if you set this to true then it will ignore the missing values.

mean(dat1$Twitches, na.rm=TRUE)

## [1] 2.226583

Standard Deviation

The standard deviation can be calculated using the sd() function:

sd(dat1$RT)

# As before if a variable has missing values then 'na.rm' must be set to true
sd(dat1$Twitches, na.rm = TRUE)

Other Descriptive Statistics

Paired sample T-test

For this section we’re going to look at the data in dat1 to see if there is a difference in reaction time between congruent and incongruent stimuli. So that calls for a paired sample T-test.
You can run a T-test using the t.test() function but how do we do that without all sort of nonsense spliting up dat1 into the 2 conditions?

But if we just execute t.test(RT ~ Congruence) R will give us an error. It can’t find ‘RT’ or ‘Congruence’, so we need to tell it where to find them by using the optional argument ‘data =’.

t.test(RT ~ Congruence, data = dat1)

## 
##  Welch Two Sample t-test
## 
## data:  RT by Congruence
## t = -5.2736, df = 9581.3, p-value = 1.367e-07
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -0.03221094 -0.01475402
## sample estimates:
##   mean in group Cong mean in group Incong 
##            0.4944810            0.5179635

Delving deeper into t.test()

Obviously a paired sample t-test is not going to be ideal for every situation, so let’s look at some of the optional arguments that can change what t.test() does by default:

• ‘alternative =’ - Specifies the direction of the hypothesis.
  • Use “less” or “greater” for one-sided tests
  • Use “two.sided” for two-sided tests
• ‘paired =’ - Specifies whether the test is paired or not.
  • FALSE by default
  • Set to TRUE for paired tests
• ‘var.equal =’ - Specifies whether to treat the two variances as equal.
  • FALSE by default
  • Set to TRUE for equal variances

So let’s assume that we have equal variances:

t.test(RT ~ Congruence, data = dat1, var.equal = TRUE)